alt Hacker Newshuh so are any languages actually dead? ChatGPT mentions FORTRAN, ALGOL, or Pascal... which I don't think are dead at all.
Ada I've never heard of, so maybe that one's dead?
If they're able to write WebAssembly compilers for all these languages, then they'll probably live forever!
The only reason punchcards are "dead" is bc the machines are gone or mostly unavailable...
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marcolussetti • 10/01/2024
Ada is still updated, last released in 2023. Given its original audience is the Department of Defense, it seems to me very likely it is far from dead.
It depends on how you define "dead". ALGOL proper has been dead for many decades, but pretty much all mainstream general purpose PLs today are its direct descendants, and sometimes this ancestry is plain to see (e.g. every time you write "struct" or "void" in a C-like language, that's straight from ALGOL 68). I once wrote a comment on HN summarizing all the various bits and pieces I know of that are still around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691821