Skip to content

Dead programming languages

40 entries marked dead.

Decade1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

FamilyC 29 Independent 24 ML 14 ALGOL 11 BASIC 9 Esoteric 9 Lisp 8 shell 7 Pascal 6 Forth 4 APL 3 Erlang 3 Prolog 3 Python 3

StatusAlive Maintenance Dormant Dead Lost Superseded

Name	Years	Status	Family	Creator / origin
Plankalkül	1948–1951	Dead	Independent	Konrad Zuse
A-0 SystemA-0	1952–1955	Dead	Independent	Grace Hopper / Remington Rand
Autocode	1952–1955	Dead	Independent	Alick Glennie / University of Manchester
FLOW-MATIC	1955–1959	Dead	Independent	Grace Hopper / Remington Rand
COMTRAN	1957–1960	Dead	Independent	Bob Bemer / IBM
ALGOL 58IAL, Zürich ALGOL	1958–1959	Dead	ALGOL	ACM/GAMM committee
ALGOL 60	1960–1980	Dead	ALGOL	International committee (Backus, Naur, van Wijngaarden et al)
JOVIALJ73	1960–	Dead	ALGOL	Jules Schwartz / SDC
SNOBOLSNOBOL4	1962–	Dead	SNOBOL	Farber, Griswold, Polonsky / Bell Labs
CPLCombined Programming Language	1963–1967	Dead	ALGOL	Cambridge & London universities
JOSS	1963–1969	Dead	Independent	Cliff Shaw / RAND
ALGOL W	1966–1972	Dead	ALGOL	Niklaus Wirth & Tony Hoare / Stanford
Coral 66	1966–	Dead	ALGOL	Royal Radar Establishment
BCPL	1967–	Dead	BCPL	Martin Richards / Cambridge
SimulaSimula 67	1967–	Dead	ALGOL	Ole-Johan Dahl & Kristen Nygaard / Norsk Regnesentral
B	1969–1972	Dead	BCPL	Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie / Bell Labs
BLISS	1970–	Dead	ALGOL	W. A. Wulf / Carnegie Mellon & DEC
CLU	1974–	Dead	ALGOL	Barbara Liskov / MIT
COMALCOMAL 80	1974–	Dead	BASIC	Børge Christensen & Benedict Løfstedt
Modula	1975–1977	Dead	Pascal	Niklaus Wirth
FP	1977–1985	Dead	Independent	John Backus / IBM
dBase	1979–	Dead	xBase	Wayne Ratliff / Ashton-Tate
occam	1983–	Dead	Independent	David May / INMOS
Clipper	1985–	Dead	xBase	Nantucket
Miranda	1985–	Dead	ML	David Turner
ABC	1987–	Dead	Independent	Leo Geurts / CWI
HyperTalk	1987–	Dead	Independent	Bill Atkinson & Dan Winkler / Apple
Modula-3	1988–	Dead	Pascal	Cardelli et al / DEC SRC & Olivetti
FoxProVisual FoxPro	1989–2015	Dead	xBase	Fox Software / Microsoft
Sather	1991–	Dead	Independent	ICSI Berkeley
Visual BasicVB, VB6	1991–	Dead	BASIC	Microsoft / Alan Cooper (Tripod prototype)
VBScript	1996–	Dead	BASIC	Microsoft
Malbolge	1998–	Dead	Esoteric	Ben Olmstead
Unlambda	1999–	Dead	Esoteric	David Madore
Joy	2001–	Dead	Forth	Manfred von Thun
X10	2004–2017	Dead	Independent	IBM Research
HolyC	2005–2018	Dead	C	Terry A. Davis
Fortress	2006–2012	Dead	ML	Guy Steele / Sun Labs
LOLCODE	2007–	Dead	Esoteric	Adam Lindsay
RockyBASIC	2014	Dead	BASIC	Rocky L. Oliver