# The seven programming ur-languages

<https://madhadron.com/posts/seven_languages.html>

- Host: [madhadron.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/madhadron.com/)
- Saved: October 7, 2021 (2021-10-08T01:14:15Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/79e624660d59/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/79e624660d59.json

## What Jamie wrote

Good overview of fundamentally different programming language paradigms.

> I am aware of seven ur-languages in software today. I’ll name them for a type specimen, the way a species in paleontology is named for a particular fossil that defines it and then other fossils are compared to the type specimen to determine their identity. The ur-languages are:
> 
> ALGOL, Lisp, ML, Self, Forth, APL, and Prolog

Many programmers will spend nearly their entire career just in the one branch -- ALGOL. And moving between languages in that branch really isn't that hard. It’s syntax difference, but the approach is similar enough. Moving to another branch is much more difficult.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT198: Weekly Thing #198 / Facebook, News, Kyiv](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/198/), Notable

## Saved the same week

- [Web3 — A vision for a decentralized web](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b5a49cfdabe9/) (blog.cloudflare.com, October 7, 2021)
- [How Cloudflare provides tools to help keep IPFS users safe](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/af75555436b9/) (blog.cloudflare.com, October 7, 2021)
- [There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data – The Markup](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/aba82e4ad0c5/) (themarkup.org, October 7, 2021)
- [My Accidental Visit to Kyiv, the Pandemic’s Party Capital - The New York Times](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/0c45e0145882/) (nytimes.com, October 7, 2021)
- [What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp? – Krebs on Security](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/1822bec2d480/) (krebsonsecurity.com, October 7, 2021)

## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://madhadron.com/posts/seven_languages.html