7 ms·

Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten. All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad tha

Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten. All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.

ux266478 1mo ago
I find that lamentation a bit funny, because the list in practice is never really complete. For instance, you forgot the mighty Prolog. Surely, tcl belongs on there too.
- Qem 1mo ago
  Also SNOBOL/Icon.
- uncircle 1mo ago
  I blame the unknown unknowns. I don’t haven’t learned Prolog yet. Alas, enlightenment still eludes me. (Agreed that TCL is pretty cool)
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    If I have to describe the feeling is that you'll realize that computation is symbolic manipulation (yes, it is obvious, but quite difficult to be fluent in it). With C and the likes you're too close to the machinery to easily grasp symbolic manipulation. But with other paradigms like lisp, prolog, oop with smalltalk,... you start learning how to design solutions in terms of symbols and their manipulations instead of values and concrete actions. Once you start doing that, you move a ladder up in problem solving, where you solve class of problems instead of specific instances.
- zelphirkalt 1mo ago
  The more of them you explore, the more insight you get. The list does not have to be complete. It just needs to list some languages, that are truly different in how they work and what the ideas behind them are.
tvink 1mo ago
Wouldn't you just do elixir now? It's like erlang but even wilder. I think smalltalk and erlang are so interesting because they model the idea of small computers so differently. Lisp just feels like the purest way to understand what the units of a programming language really is.
- ux266478 1mo ago
  For me, Elixir misses the mark. If you're an unc with a background in Ruby or that era of webdev, I can see the appeal. It's a familiar set dressing. I don't have that background, I much prefer the syntactic structure of Erlang's psuedo-horn clauses. Both for similar familiarity reasons (I knew Prolog before I touched Erlang), as well as a general preference for the simplicity.
  - uncircle 1mo ago
    The similarity of Ruby and Elixir is only extremely superficial and betrays your lack of familiarity with the language.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ux266478 1mo ago
      I didn't imply otherwise, nor is the story different on the Erlang-Prolog axis (actually it's even more pronounced there.) I literally called it "set dressing". Where I think you go off the rails is that you're conflating surface-level things with irrelevance. Which isn't really true, especially in matters of taste. I find this to be a very strange thing to get defensive about. It's not exactly a subtle part of Elixir's history. It was pretty well documented to be born out of the creator's dissatisfaction with concurrency in Ruby, and simultaneously, for a more Ruby-like language on the BEAM. That doesn't mean it's literally Ruby-on-the-BEAM (which was originally attempted, and didn't work out), however mistaking that as cause to dismiss the link between the two and the carry-over appeal for developers is an unsound overcorrection.
  - 1mo ago
konart 1mo ago
And that's completely natural. Compare it with woodworking. Yes, some people would dive deep into the craft and create works of art, exquisite furniture and tools they need to make it even better. But those are the few. For the most of woodworkers this is just something they somehow learned to do on a level needed to be able to get a job and make living.
andsoitis 1mo ago
And Prolog and Assembly!
- uncircle 1mo ago
  Assembly is very useful to learn, but does not bring as strong a paradigm shift, as it is similar to most other imperative, procedural languages.
  - vanderZwan 1mo ago
    Bootstrapping a Forth in assembly is probably a better option, two birds with one stone.
    - danhite 1mo ago
      or, if you're a stoned bird, perhaps bootstrap your modern skillz by ... a session prompting Claude to quickly write all of: a forth style assembler for wasm targeting a forth written in 6502 machine code (not assembly) targeting a 6502 emulator/debugger written in Rust that Rust being compiled into a wasm browser project with a typescript ui for display api support for all the nested contexts personally I've only ever done the forth-like in 6502 machine code task, but then I am old and useless (er, "retired") and wouldn't want to mislead youngsters onto my failed path
  - mettamage 1mo ago
    It does though. It teaches you that closed source is still open source in many many ways. Especially when you have something like Ghidra or IDA Pro. Nowadays this is even more true because LLMs can speed up retrieval of missing knowledge way more quickly. Back in the day I had to search for stuff but I bet now that LLMs give a decent guess at decompilation of something. Also it's the systems programming language and requires you to dive into the computer architecture of things. Try that with Python or JavaScript.
iLemming 1mo ago
Lisp is not "forgotten". It's quite alive, kicking and running [big] circles. Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions. Apple, Walmart, Netflix, Cisco, Amazon - they all use Clojure. Google and Grammarly use Common Lisp. Check the GitHub language stats and be surprised to see Emacs Lisp among the visible top. There's so much Elisp on GitHub alone - it's just effing crazy. That fact alone at least should be surprising. Remember? This is a not a general-purpose language - it's made for one and only thing, tis a damn configuration language for a text editor. And no, it isn't "some old stuff", check r/emacs - new packages get announced daily! I'm not even exaggerating - new stuff for Emacs comes every single day. Who the heck are all these psychos? Have they not realized how "forgotten" and "dead" Lisp was? Seriously though, Lisp dialects are enormously practical, it is inconceivable today to find a runtime where you just can't run stuff built with a Lisp. And Lispers keep adding more - Janet, Jank, Jolt, Fennel, Clojure-Dart, Cljbang, Squint - all are pretty young, yet already not some "useless toys" - they're used to build real stuff.
- computably 1mo ago
  > Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions. - There's not much correlation between tech stack and product quality, let alone market share. - JPMC has ~$4.4T in assets vs. Nubank $75B ($0.075T).
  - iLemming 1mo ago
    > There's not much correlation In this specific case it is. There is a direct correlation. One simply needs to do fifteen seconds of research into it - Datomic was the single strategic multiplier that enabled Nubank's success. Later they made an executive decision to acquire Cognitect to secure their critical tech element. They didn't buy the makers of Clojure simply out of love for Rich Hickey's hairstyle. Your point about JPMC is silly - assets are not a customer base, and I said nothing about the former. If JPMC had grown its customer base at the same 10.9x rate as Nubank, starting from ~60M in 2019, they would have reached roughly 10% of Earth's population. Arguing against Nubank's achievement is like insisting on a flat Earth. Not attributing their success to their tech stack is just not knowing the facts.
NetMageSCW 1mo ago
No love for APL?
dev_dan_2 1mo ago
My version of that list, in no particular order: Smalltalk, Haskell, C, Lisp, Prolog, Forth.
mettamage 1mo ago
Favorited and commenting on this so I can get back to this :)

ux266478 1mo ago

I find that lamentation a bit funny, because the list in practice is never really complete. For instance, you forgot the mighty Prolog. Surely, tcl belongs on there too.

Qem 1mo ago
Also SNOBOL/Icon.
uncircle 1mo ago
I blame the unknown unknowns. I don’t haven’t learned Prolog yet. Alas, enlightenment still eludes me. (Agreed that TCL is pretty cool)
- skydhash 1mo ago
  If I have to describe the feeling is that you'll realize that computation is symbolic manipulation (yes, it is obvious, but quite difficult to be fluent in it). With C and the likes you're too close to the machinery to easily grasp symbolic manipulation. But with other paradigms like lisp, prolog, oop with smalltalk,... you start learning how to design solutions in terms of symbols and their manipulations instead of values and concrete actions. Once you start doing that, you move a ladder up in problem solving, where you solve class of problems instead of specific instances.
zelphirkalt 1mo ago
The more of them you explore, the more insight you get. The list does not have to be complete. It just needs to list some languages, that are truly different in how they work and what the ideas behind them are.

tvink 1mo ago

Wouldn't you just do elixir now? It's like erlang but even wilder. I think smalltalk and erlang are so interesting because they model the idea of small computers so differently. Lisp just feels like the purest way to understand what the units of a programming language really is.

ux266478 1mo ago
For me, Elixir misses the mark. If you're an unc with a background in Ruby or that era of webdev, I can see the appeal. It's a familiar set dressing. I don't have that background, I much prefer the syntactic structure of Erlang's psuedo-horn clauses. Both for similar familiarity reasons (I knew Prolog before I touched Erlang), as well as a general preference for the simplicity.
- uncircle 1mo ago
  The similarity of Ruby and Elixir is only extremely superficial and betrays your lack of familiarity with the language.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ux266478 1mo ago
    I didn't imply otherwise, nor is the story different on the Erlang-Prolog axis (actually it's even more pronounced there.) I literally called it "set dressing". Where I think you go off the rails is that you're conflating surface-level things with irrelevance. Which isn't really true, especially in matters of taste. I find this to be a very strange thing to get defensive about. It's not exactly a subtle part of Elixir's history. It was pretty well documented to be born out of the creator's dissatisfaction with concurrency in Ruby, and simultaneously, for a more Ruby-like language on the BEAM. That doesn't mean it's literally Ruby-on-the-BEAM (which was originally attempted, and didn't work out), however mistaking that as cause to dismiss the link between the two and the carry-over appeal for developers is an unsound overcorrection.
- 1mo ago

konart 1mo ago

And that's completely natural. Compare it with woodworking. Yes, some people would dive deep into the craft and create works of art, exquisite furniture and tools they need to make it even better. But those are the few. For the most of woodworkers this is just something they somehow learned to do on a level needed to be able to get a job and make living.

andsoitis 1mo ago

And Prolog and Assembly!

uncircle 1mo ago
Assembly is very useful to learn, but does not bring as strong a paradigm shift, as it is similar to most other imperative, procedural languages.
- vanderZwan 1mo ago
  Bootstrapping a Forth in assembly is probably a better option, two birds with one stone.
  - danhite 1mo ago
    or, if you're a stoned bird, perhaps bootstrap your modern skillz by ... a session prompting Claude to quickly write all of: a forth style assembler for wasm targeting a forth written in 6502 machine code (not assembly) targeting a 6502 emulator/debugger written in Rust that Rust being compiled into a wasm browser project with a typescript ui for display api support for all the nested contexts personally I've only ever done the forth-like in 6502 machine code task, but then I am old and useless (er, "retired") and wouldn't want to mislead youngsters onto my failed path
- mettamage 1mo ago
  It does though. It teaches you that closed source is still open source in many many ways. Especially when you have something like Ghidra or IDA Pro. Nowadays this is even more true because LLMs can speed up retrieval of missing knowledge way more quickly. Back in the day I had to search for stuff but I bet now that LLMs give a decent guess at decompilation of something. Also it's the systems programming language and requires you to dive into the computer architecture of things. Try that with Python or JavaScript.

iLemming 1mo ago

Lisp is not "forgotten". It's quite alive, kicking and running [big] circles. Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions. Apple, Walmart, Netflix, Cisco, Amazon - they all use Clojure. Google and Grammarly use Common Lisp. Check the GitHub language stats and be surprised to see Emacs Lisp among the visible top. There's so much Elisp on GitHub alone - it's just effing crazy. That fact alone at least should be surprising. Remember? This is a not a general-purpose language - it's made for one and only thing, tis a damn configuration language for a text editor. And no, it isn't "some old stuff", check r/emacs - new packages get announced daily! I'm not even exaggerating - new stuff for Emacs comes every single day. Who the heck are all these psychos? Have they not realized how "forgotten" and "dead" Lisp was? Seriously though, Lisp dialects are enormously practical, it is inconceivable today to find a runtime where you just can't run stuff built with a Lisp. And Lispers keep adding more - Janet, Jank, Jolt, Fennel, Clojure-Dart, Cljbang, Squint - all are pretty young, yet already not some "useless toys" - they're used to build real stuff.

computably 1mo ago
> Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions. - There's not much correlation between tech stack and product quality, let alone market share. - JPMC has ~$4.4T in assets vs. Nubank $75B ($0.075T).
- iLemming 1mo ago
  > There's not much correlation In this specific case it is. There is a direct correlation. One simply needs to do fifteen seconds of research into it - Datomic was the single strategic multiplier that enabled Nubank's success. Later they made an executive decision to acquire Cognitect to secure their critical tech element. They didn't buy the makers of Clojure simply out of love for Rich Hickey's hairstyle. Your point about JPMC is silly - assets are not a customer base, and I said nothing about the former. If JPMC had grown its customer base at the same 10.9x rate as Nubank, starting from ~60M in 2019, they would have reached roughly 10% of Earth's population. Arguing against Nubank's achievement is like insisting on a flat Earth. Not attributing their success to their tech stack is just not knowing the facts.

NetMageSCW 1mo ago

No love for APL?

dev_dan_2 1mo ago

My version of that list, in no particular order: Smalltalk, Haskell, C, Lisp, Prolog, Forth.

mettamage 1mo ago

Favorited and commenting on this so I can get back to this :)