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Why Do Programming Languages Rise and Fall? Part 2

2026 August 06 - By Andrew Oram

The first article in this two-part series looked at programming languages with long tenures. In this section we’ll examine a few cases of languages that didn’t fare so well—despite high hopes for them.

False Starts

Some languages make a big splash but fail to really catch on. The most salient example is Pascal. It was invented in 1970 by the distinguished computer scientist Niklaus Wirth to solve the problem of spaghetti code.

Wirth and other researchers of the time, such as the brilliant, outspoken, and somewhat feared Edsger W. Dijkstra, decided that the way to make programs less buggy and more maintainable was "structured programming." Just as parents and neighborhoods, by providing structure for children, help them grow (sometimes) into responsible adults, a language that enforces good programming habits is supposed to create responsible programmers.

This was actually a good idea, and an early demonstration of the concept of design patterns. The term was an architectural concept, invented by Christopher Alexander for his 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. The term entered programming in the 1994 book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by a quartet of computer science experts known best as the Gang of Four.

In practice, patterns start out as good programming practices that programmers are supposed to be (but find difficulty) following. The patterns are then incorporated into libraries, which make them easier to use. Finally, they are integrated into the syntax of programming languages, so that programmers can use a convenient construct such as forall without having to think about it on an abstract level.

Pascal became the darling of the computer science researchers and was supposed to show everybody how to program properly. It was widely taught in computer science courses (as Java is today), which should have clinched its dominance. So why didn’t it last?

It seems that even the redoubtable Wirth did not go far enough in standardizing good programming practices, and was not aware which way the winds of programming were blowing. Pascal was not object-oriented, a concept already making headway. Object Pascal was introduced in the mid-1980s, but it came too late.

Developer James Vasile ascribes Pascal’s problem to its design as a teaching language. It lacked a portable compiler and features needed for production use, such as a variable-length string type. Several such lapses were aired in a paper cited by computer science researcher Greg Wilson in his review of this article: "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Language" by Brian Kernighan, one of the central creators of Unix and C.

Another interesting language that made a false start was Objective-C, invented shortly after C++. The reason Objective-C, a syntax-heavy language weighed down by introspection features and an inscrutable memory management system, captures our attention is that Steve Jobs chose it for a new system he developed after leaving Apple, the NeXT computer. That was in the 1980s, before it was clear which object-oriented version of the C language would win out.

And when Jobs was brought back to Apple in 1997 to turn it into the behemoth it is today, Jobs called for applications to be coded in Objective-C even though he should have known better by then. When the iPhone opened its fabled "app store" to eager developers, they all had to learn Objective-C. The language is regaining its much-deserved obscurity now that Apple uses Swift for mobile devices.

(Google went through a similar evolution for its mobile devices, starting by promoting Java because it was so widespread, and then switching to the previously obscure Kotlin language.)

Two other languages were favored by large organizations that tried to impose them on developers. The first was PL-1, which was promoted in the 1960s by IBM, the company for whom the term "large organization" hardly conveys more than a hint of its monolithic importance. PL-1 became the Edsel of programming languages.

The other was Ada, developed in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Defense and required for innumerable defense contracts. The DoD guessed right when it sponsored the internet, but it tumbled into a pit with Ada. Vasile points out that Ada also required an expensive proprietary compiler.

Now for a claim many will find controversial—notably, supporters of the Ruby language. This language hasn’t gone the way of Pascal or Perl, but it has fallen far from its heights in the mid-2000 decade when Ruby on Rails came out. At that time, Ruby looked like Perl’s successor, and certainly...