July 11, 2026
Pure BLISS or retro delusion?
BLISS
The forgotten coding legend making old-school fans spiral, joke, and flex hard
TLDR: BLISS was once a major systems language before C took over, and it still quietly lives on in old software history and modern hobby projects. Commenters turned the story into a nostalgia-fest, debating whether it was a forgotten gem, a retro flex, or the star of a hilariously weird alternate internet.
Before the world fell head-over-heels for C, there was BLISS: a 1970 programming language from Carnegie Mellon that helped power serious computer systems and even parts of Digital Equipment Corporation’s software empire. In plain English: this was one of those behind-the-scenes languages that helped build the bones of old computing, then got shoved out of the spotlight when a shinier rival took over. And the comments? Oh, they treated this like a surprise reunion tour for a cult band nobody expected to trend again.
The loudest reactions were pure nostalgia mixed with nerdy chest-thumping. One commenter popped in with the digital equivalent of “it’s not dead yet!”, linking to a still-living compiler project. Another got almost poetic about how BLISS handled variables, basically saying the language let you write what you meant—which, to fans, makes BLISS sound less like dusty history and more like the one that got away. Then came the retro gaming brag: apparently some Atari arcade games were written in it, which instantly upgraded BLISS from “obscure old tool” to secret ancestor of your misspent youth.
But the funniest chaos came from the alternate-history brainworms. One commenter imagined a cursed timeline where browsers were built around BLISS first, and then JavaScript arrived later like some chaotic newcomer. Would anyone switch? That one comment basically launched a whole vibe: is BLISS a forgotten genius, or are people just romantically doom-posting about old tech again? Either way, the crowd clearly loved the drama of resurrecting a nearly vanished language and acting like history made a suspiciously bad choice.
Key Points
- •BLISS is a systems programming language created at Carnegie Mellon University around 1970 by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann.
- •The language is typeless, block-structured, expression-based, and includes exception handling, coroutines, and macros, while omitting a goto statement.
- •The original Carnegie Mellon BLISS compiler was notable for extensive optimization work and influenced the book The Design of an Optimizing Compiler.
- •Digital Equipment Corporation developed and maintained BLISS compilers for many architectures, including PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, MIPS, DEC Alpha, IA-32, IA-64, and x86-64.
- •BLISS was used heavily inside DEC, and most utility programs for the OpenVMS operating system were written in BLISS-32.