> BASIC was the first language with a real-time interpreter (the Dartmouth Time Sharing System), beating APL by a year.
Of course Steve Russell wrote the first Lisp interpreter years before that.
Not to take away the significance of BASIC, but that wasn't it. I think in fact many of the "Significance" sections are rather condescending; COBOL was significant in being the first "mass" high level language, transformational in the same was BASIC was (and more than BASIC).
FORTRAN was hugely influential on computing, is mentioned all through the article, yet isn't considered "influential"?
Fortran presumably didn't make the list because it's not dead. Scientific-computing labs still use it directly, and perhaps more importantly, if you write code today that does any kind of linear algebra, it's probably using foundational libraries that are written in Fortran and still actively maintained as such, even though most users call them through FFI from newer languages that offer a better developer experience.
the only knowledge I have of Fortran not being dead is that its use in scientific computing is brought up in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE PL CONVERSATIONS I've been in dating back to the 1970s. (It was the first language I learned if you you don't count HP calculators)
COBOL too.
Do the people maintaining these libraries get harangued on a weekly basis about how Fortran has undefined behavior and the PDP-11 and IBM 360 ISAs are not appropriate for modern multi level cached pipelined speculatively executed CPUs? How can their matrix multiplication libraries be as fast as they can be if they are assuming/relying on memory allocation layouts that don't exist any more in the hardware?
Of course Steve Russell wrote the first Lisp interpreter years before that.
Not to take away the significance of BASIC, but that wasn't it. I think in fact many of the "Significance" sections are rather condescending; COBOL was significant in being the first "mass" high level language, transformational in the same was BASIC was (and more than BASIC).
FORTRAN was hugely influential on computing, is mentioned all through the article, yet isn't considered "influential"?