There are many programming languages that have been forgotten over time. For example, my first course on Visual Basic 4.0 was paid for with a check in lire.
The package included drag and drop, ODBC, and select with binding that fetched data from MSAccess, builds with packages containing libraries that would almost certainly trigger DLL Hell, one of the worst plagues a programmer could face, who could always hide behind the classic “it works on my PC” excuse.
But the shift from 16-bit to 32-bit was a game-changer, and the fact that programs started using Windows 95 controls sparked months of discussions on how “real” programming was over: now we’d have kids who had no idea what they were doing because all they had to do was drag and connect icons like any “codemonkey,” does this ring a bell?
Thirty years have passed, but the fears and hopes of programmers are still the same.
Back then, smoking was still allowed in the office, and my senior was the classic programmer of the time: a cigarette always lit, heavy metal blaring from speakers that crackled every time a cellphone within a kilometer received a text, and a sarcastic laugh every time you made a semicolon mistake. The only benefit I managed to get was a beautiful anti-glare screen, though I think it might have seriously affected my eyesight.
To top it all off, there were the hours spent choosing a screensaver that wouldn’t burn the screen like a clay tablet. The most famous one was Johnny Castaway by Sierra, so hypnotic that I still remember some of its scenes. The poor alternative was the clock or your name doing somersaults—there’s a hilarious episode about this in The Office.
I couldn’t quantify how many “management” systems I built back then, but I was always ready to refactor, thinking about how easy it would be, in the years to come, to revisit that code.
Tears in the rain, soon after, VisualBasic 5 was released, my first object-oriented language with the manual by Debora Kurata and examples of the car class with brake and accelerate methods. I think if I try hard enough, I can even remember the illustrations she used to explain it all.
Thanks to my pontificating about classes and cookies, I had earned my programmer stripes, and, especially with the right outfit for the role, people started calling me for unlikely interviews in impossible contexts.
I don’t know how many times consulting companies tried to push me into some SAP project to turn me into an ABAP expert, a very dangerous language because its early versions had comments written in German, and it seems many programmers died of liver cirrhosis due to wrong translations.
I also clearly remember when I was almost about to accept a job at a bank, if only to make my parents happy, but they wanted to hire me to work with COBOL, and just two days of black screens were enough to bring to mind the Sarlacc scene in Return of the Jedi: “In its belly, you will discover a new level of pain and suffering, slowly being digested over a thousand years.”
However, at my old company, the golden age of CBT (Computer-Based Training) had begun, which had nothing to do with soft drugs, and we had secured work for another couple of years.
Computer-Based Training was essentially a series of lessons on boring topics like workplace safety, fire drills, and other subjects that had paper manuals to be translated into bits.
Thanks to the advent of rewritable CD-ROMs, it was possible to create courses on practically anything, complete with animations and final tests for each lesson. I know that now a 640MB capacity might seem ridiculous, but at the time, it was a real blast.
Now, implementing this with VB5 was possible, but it certainly wasn’t the easiest language to do these things with, so we adopted Authorware, a terrifying RAD tool that had been around since 1987. It was a system of visual semaphores, if blocks, and for loops, with a lot of time spent trying to figure out how to capture quiz answers into something other than a text file.
Soon after, the company would merge with Macromind, achieving at least the notable result of changing the company’s name to something less unsettling—Macromind sounded too much like something out of a comic book.
It was 1992, and Macromedia was born. With Director as its flagship product, it brought a breath of fresh air, having borrowed concepts from the cinematic language, organizing the application into a Stage, a Cast, and a Score—basically, an interactive timeline for actions and synchronizations driven by Lingo, one of the coolest programming languages of the time.
A dozen CBTs later, I felt like Fellini, making every object on the stage do somersaults, and I was sure that one day there would be an Oscar for the best use of a variable.
That was until the web grew with Perl and ASP, two programming languages and an infinite world of possibilities.
Possibilities that hit me like a ton of bricks one Monday morning when my then-boss tricked me into going to a company, presenting me as the biggest ASP expert around.
Luckily, the office was near a Feltrinelli, and after assuring them I would have everything done by the previous day, I rushed to buy the only available manuals, which became my pillows for a couple of weeks.
Creating dynamic tables with a for loop and raw HTML code was my daily bread for quite a while, then Flash came along and everything changed overnight. Macromedia had jumped into the web world and, in addition to Dreamweaver, the most beautiful editor I’ve ever used, they had come up with strange things like Fireworks and ColdFusion, but they really hit it big by making vector animations incredibly easy and adding a proper programming language to boot.
I still remember my first Flash programmer, a skinny blonde guy with very few words, always smoking stinky cigarettes that were half-smoked the moment he opened the pack, available only in the afternoon, and always with a gun in his pants.
I couldn’t say whether his first job was as a security guard or a cop, but I was always very deferential when reporting bugs or asking for changes, and I tried to interact with him as little as possible.
I’d pass him variable strings, which he turned into graphs and flying stars for a huge project of which we were the 15th subcontractor.
I still think back to that job with pride; we did the work of 20 developers in 2 and half the time. Naturally, my company rewarded me by losing the next contract.
But by then, there were so many projects coming in that eventually I found myself opening stages and writing in ActionScript, copying, pasting, and shouting over 1000 lines of code to make a button look cool.
Everyone started building games, dynamic forms, pie charts that turned into flying saucers, and eventually full-blown cartoons that outshone many “old style” products.
Until Steve Jobs played the Queen of Hearts, and our poor Flash was beheaded one September day. To this day, ActionScript is the only dead programming language where we’ve identified the killer.
ASP, on the other hand, was the victim of a conspiracy led by Microsoft, and its death is reminiscent of the famous painting where Caesar covers his face while even the passersby stab him. He was probably doing it to avoid seeing VB.NET, but it didn’t last long either.
PHP and Python, however, will never thank ASP enough, even though in reality, Python was slowly eating up Perl’s space and taking its place in the hearts of universities, from where it would relaunch after some missteps.
Speaking of universities and scientific environments, Fortran is still used in many projects, with few rivals in its field. While writing this article, I looked up job offers, and they all sound amazing, like “ballistics expert for a company working on solid propulsion systems” or “specialist for evaluating the effect of ice buildup on aerodynamic properties.” It seems it’s also in high demand at ESA and NASA. Rocket science, folks.
Another striking case of cannibalism was the one carried out by Delphi, which devoured the good old Pascal—a crime that didn’t make much noise, to be honest. Delphi gained some popularity but is the classic case of a misunderstood language; some people still speak it in the mountains, but if you dare to bring it down into populated contexts, you risk being seen as someone who just came out of the vault after a century.
At the end of this rundown, it’s easy to realize that truly “dead” programming languages are few and almost always the sacrificial offspring of software houses. Those that have been adopted by communities with more or less open licenses continue to thrive, even in niche contexts, doing their “dirty” work, praised by more or less large communities that keep passing poetic snippets of code, like in that Robin Williams movie.
Experiences like those with ActionScript and ASP were important but ended badly, for reasons entirely unrelated to the product’s quality or commercial success.
If I had to invest in one of the “superficial” programming languages today, like Golang, Rust, or Kotlin, I’d first need to understand how much the developer community matters and what movements have been made regarding licensing; otherwise, we’ll keep seeing endless “cosmic flips,” like the transition from Objective-C to Swift, which are bound to claim victims forever.
PS: Just as I was about to finish this article, I got a disturbing phone call asking if I had skills in ASP to work on a fairly complex management system with a database written in Access 4.
It reminded me a lot of the movie Space Cowboys, where NASA has to send a spry 70-year-old designer into space because he’s the only one who can fix a satellite built in the ’60s. I’m debating whether to ignore it or dive into a mountain of senseless code to save the world—especially since I can’t even remember if anyone dies in the end.
But having chosen this job as my mission, I already know the answer… and I hear they pay well…
