April 19, 2026
Seven tribes, one comment war
The seven programming ur-languages
Seven “parent” coding tribes ignite a history brawl and an AI-age eye roll
TLDR: A writer maps seven “parent” styles behind most coding languages and says learning the patterns matters more than the specific tongue. Commenters split: some nitpick the history, others add missing bits like Datalog, and one bold claim says AI tools make learning multiple languages unnecessary—sparking serious pushback.
Seven grand “parent styles” of coding—ALGOL, Lisp, ML, Self, Forth, APL, Prolog—hit the timeline, and the comments instantly turned into History Channel meets Reddit roast. Fans loved the big-picture map, but the naming police marched in: one user begged, call them “cognates” instead, linking a neat definition (cognate). Meanwhile, a historian type side‑eyed the claim that COBOL and Fortran sit under ALGOL, calling it a “stretch.” Translation: don’t mess with grandma’s family tree.
Tool‑builders piled in with receipts and goodies: links to ALGOL resources and Forth kits galore—Gforth, PFE, even EForth for the brave. Logic heads waved the Datalog flag, arguing the “logic languages” aisle deserves more than Prolog. But the real bonfire? One commenter declared that in the age of AI writing code, learning lots of languages is “rapidly redundant.” Cue yelling: old‑schoolers fired back that fundamentals—loops, recursion, thinking patterns—still matter; AI won’t save you from spaghetti. AI‑optimists shrugged: if the robot co‑pilot knows five tongues, why should I?
Jokes flew like curly braces: Lisp as the “parentheses cult,” APL as “emoji algebra,” and Forth fans dubbing themselves “stack whisperers.” The vibe: a fun family reunion where someone brought a genealogy chart and someone else brought a flamethrower.
Key Points
- •The author groups programming languages into seven foundational “ur-languages”: ALGOL, Lisp, ML, Self, Forth, APL, and Prolog.
- •Imperative iteration patterns (e.g., looping over arrays or combinations) are similar across ALGOL-style languages like C, Java, Python, and Fortran.
- •Different ur-languages emphasize different patterns (e.g., recursion in Standard ML or Prolog; macros and code-as-data in Lisp; symbolic expressions in APL).
- •ALGOL is presented as the oldest ur-language, with roots from early programming efforts (Lovelace, Babbage) through structured programming and ALGOL 60.
- •Mainstream languages trace to ALGOL; features from Self (classes) were adopted in the 1980s, and ML ideas have influenced ALGOL-style languages since 2010.