The fecundity of programming languages

Some programming languages are more rigorous than others. Some programming languages are said to be more beautiful than others. Some programming languages are more popular than others.

And some programming languages are more prolific than others, in the sense that they are the basis for new programming languages.

Algol, for example, influenced the development of Pascal and C, which in turn influenced Java, C# and many others.

FORTRAN influenced BASIC, which in turn gave us CBASIC, Visual Basic, and True Basic.

The Unix shell lead to Awk and Perl, which influenced Python and Ruby.

But COBOL has had little influence on languages. Yes, it has been revised, including an object-oriented version. Yes, it guided the PL/I and ABAP languages. But outside of those business-specific languages, COBOL has had almost no effect on programming languages.

Why?

I'm not certain, but I have two ideas: COBOL was as early language, and it designed for commercial uses.

COBOL is one of the earliest languages, dating back to the 1950s. Other languages of the time include FORTRAN and LISP (and oodles of forgotten languages like A-0 and FLOWMATIC). We had no experience with programming languages. We didn't know what worked and what didn't work. We didn't know which language features were useful to programmers. Since we didn't know, we had to guess.

For a near-blind guess, COBOL was pretty good. It has been useful in close to its original form for decades, a shark in the evolution of programming languages.

The other reason we didn't use COBOL to create other languages is that it was commercial. It was designed for business transactions. While it ran on general-purpose computers, COBOL was specific to the financial applications, and the people who would tinker and build new languages were working in other fields and with computers other than business mainframes.

The tinkerers were using minicomputers (and later, microcomputers). These were not in the financial setting but in universities, where people were more willing to explore new languages. Minicomputers from DEC were often equipped with FORTRAN and BASIC. Unix computers were equipped with C. Microcomputers often came with BASIC baked in, because it was easier for individuals to use.

COBOL's success in the financial sector may have doomed it to stagnancy. Corporations (especially banks and insurance companies) lean conservative with technology and programming; they prefer to focus on profits and not research.

I see a similar future for SQL. As a data descriptions and access language, it does an excellent job. But it is very specific and cannot be used outside of that domain. The up-and-coming NoSQL databases avoid SQL in part, I think, because the SQL language is tied to relational algebra and structured data. I see no languages (well, no popular languages) derived from SQL.

I think the languages that will influence or generate new languages will be those which are currently popular, easily learned, and easily used. They must be available to the tinkerers of today; those tinkerers will be writing the languages of the future. Tinkerers have limited resources, so less expensive languages have an advantage. Tinkerers are also a finicky bunch, with only a few willing to work with ornery products (or languages).

Considering those factors, I think that future languages will come from a set of languages in use today. That set includes C, C#, Java, Python, and JavaScript. I omit a number of candidates, including Perl, C++, and possibly your favorite language. (I consider Perl and C++ difficult languages; tinkerers will move to easier languages. I would like to include FORTH in the list, but it too is a difficult language.)