5 ms·

Perl is 25. Python is 21. Lua is 19. Ruby is 17. Interesting how I consider Perl an 'old' language, and the others new languages. I guess it says more about ho

by FigBug 14y ago

Perl is 25. Python is 21. Lua is 19. Ruby is 17. Interesting how I consider Perl an 'old' language, and the others new languages. I guess it says more about how revolutionary Perl was at the time and how quickly it became widespread. The only other language I know of that went from 0 to everywhere in under 5 years was Javascript.

podperson 14y ago
PHP probably gets in there somewhere. (I looked up the history -- I did not know that PHP was first implemented in Perl.) PHP was first created in 1994, so it's 18.
- davorg 14y ago
  That's the same age as Perl 5.
felideon 14y ago
Common Lisp is 28, which a year younger than C++ and not much older than Perl. So not a dinosaur language as some people think. <g>
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development. Fortunately many of those good ideas have trickled down over the decades, making mainstream languages steadily less terrible, and competing proprietary implementations are no longer commonplace.
  - derleth 14y ago
    > Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development. Hm. If we do this, then C++ is merely one 'capstone' on the history of Algol development, which is about as old as Lisp is.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  FORTRAN is the oldest language that is still used today. If you consider the Lisp dialects together as a single language, then Lisp would be a close second. Scheme, for example, is a decade older than Common Lisp, but it's still commonly considered a Lisp (no pun intended).
chadzawistowski 14y ago
Counting the years from the time the languages entered the spotlight might be a better metric of age. Even though Python is only four years younger than Perl, it feels so much newer because it spent more time 'in the oven'. I'd peg Python's coming of age around 2001, although I could be wrong about that. Ruby is even fresher out of the oven, not really reaching the limelight until 2006.
kyrra 14y ago
Made me look up the timeline of when languages were released: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languag... Pascal is 42, C is 40. Lots of fun info on that page.
- lloeki 14y ago
  I don't know where you can find widespread Pascal, but Fortran is 55 and is still actively used and distributed in NumPy.
  - kyrra 14y ago
    Ya, I have no clue either. Pascal was the first language I was originally taught (though I had been messing with QuickBasic for a few years before that). Pascal seemed to have died out in the late 90's.
  - rootbear 14y ago
    It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use. I know that there is a lot of F77 still around, but the Fortran code I've seen at NASA is at least up to F90/F95. Someone who learned F95 or later and never wrote fixed format Fortran would be pretty lost if they had to work on F77 or, Backus forbid, F66. C, on the other hand, has changed much less, beyond the ANSI function declarations. I first used the C version that was in 6th Edition AT&T UNIX and that had some features that would look strange to modern users, such as initializers not using = signs: int i 4; and the assignment operators being the other way round: a =+ 2; The point is, when discussing the age of a language, how important is the degree of change over time? At what point is it a new language? The same is true of human languages. I can understand Shakespeare with little trouble, but I miss some points unless there are footnotes. I can get a bit of Chaucer, but far from full comprehension. Beowulf? Not a prayer. But it's all "English"...
    - btilly 14y ago
      COBOL. People still run production COBOL programs, today, that were written in the 60s and 70s. They may compile it with a version of COBOL that has support for features like object oriented programming. But the programs were written decades ago, and do not use those features. I know one person who, 10 years ago, went back to work for the same company that she had worked at 30 years prior. Among other things she found a PL/I program that not only was around, but the last commit on was hers. She asked them, "I'm the last person to touch that, and I don't even know that language any more! Why are you still running it?" The answer was, "It never broke." (Sadly that company went bankrupt in the financial crisis, so her code is probably now dead.) Code can live forever.
trhtrsh 14y ago
JavaScript is 15.

by FigBug 14y ago

podperson 14y ago

PHP probably gets in there somewhere. (I looked up the history -- I did not know that PHP was first implemented in Perl.) PHP was first created in 1994, so it's 18.

davorg 14y ago
That's the same age as Perl 5.

felideon 14y ago

Common Lisp is 28, which a year younger than C++ and not much older than Perl. So not a dinosaur language as some people think. <g>

prodigal_erik 14y ago
Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development. Fortunately many of those good ideas have trickled down over the decades, making mainstream languages steadily less terrible, and competing proprietary implementations are no longer commonplace.
- derleth 14y ago
  > Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development. Hm. If we do this, then C++ is merely one 'capstone' on the history of Algol development, which is about as old as Lisp is.
chimeracoder 14y ago
FORTRAN is the oldest language that is still used today. If you consider the Lisp dialects together as a single language, then Lisp would be a close second. Scheme, for example, is a decade older than Common Lisp, but it's still commonly considered a Lisp (no pun intended).

chadzawistowski 14y ago

Counting the years from the time the languages entered the spotlight might be a better metric of age. Even though Python is only four years younger than Perl, it feels so much newer because it spent more time 'in the oven'. I'd peg Python's coming of age around 2001, although I could be wrong about that. Ruby is even fresher out of the oven, not really reaching the limelight until 2006.

kyrra 14y ago

Made me look up the timeline of when languages were released: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languag... Pascal is 42, C is 40. Lots of fun info on that page.

lloeki 14y ago
I don't know where you can find widespread Pascal, but Fortran is 55 and is still actively used and distributed in NumPy.
- kyrra 14y ago
  Ya, I have no clue either. Pascal was the first language I was originally taught (though I had been messing with QuickBasic for a few years before that). Pascal seemed to have died out in the late 90's.
- rootbear 14y ago
  It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use. I know that there is a lot of F77 still around, but the Fortran code I've seen at NASA is at least up to F90/F95. Someone who learned F95 or later and never wrote fixed format Fortran would be pretty lost if they had to work on F77 or, Backus forbid, F66. C, on the other hand, has changed much less, beyond the ANSI function declarations. I first used the C version that was in 6th Edition AT&T UNIX and that had some features that would look strange to modern users, such as initializers not using = signs: int i 4; and the assignment operators being the other way round: a =+ 2; The point is, when discussing the age of a language, how important is the degree of change over time? At what point is it a new language? The same is true of human languages. I can understand Shakespeare with little trouble, but I miss some points unless there are footnotes. I can get a bit of Chaucer, but far from full comprehension. Beowulf? Not a prayer. But it's all "English"...
  - btilly 14y ago
    COBOL. People still run production COBOL programs, today, that were written in the 60s and 70s. They may compile it with a version of COBOL that has support for features like object oriented programming. But the programs were written decades ago, and do not use those features. I know one person who, 10 years ago, went back to work for the same company that she had worked at 30 years prior. Among other things she found a PL/I program that not only was around, but the last commit on was hers. She asked them, "I'm the last person to touch that, and I don't even know that language any more! Why are you still running it?" The answer was, "It never broke." (Sadly that company went bankrupt in the financial crisis, so her code is probably now dead.) Code can live forever.

trhtrsh 14y ago

JavaScript is 15.