The Programming Language You Want to Delete Already Ghost-Haunts Your Entire Codebase

I've been wrong about this. Multiple times.

Back when I was kicking around tech forums a decade ago, I loved the "which programming language would you delete from history" game. Young, opinionated, thought I had it all figured out. PHP? A pipeline from hell straight to spaghetti code. JavaScript? The browser's cancer cell. I wanted to personally scrub them from the timeline.

Then I spent a few years maintaining twenty-year-old production systems. Reality has a way of slapping the arrogance out of you.

Here's what got me thinking about this again. Someone on a forum—one of those threads where people fantasize about language deletion—dropped an answer that stopped me mid-scroll. They pointed out something I'd never considered: C was born in 1972, but Pascal beat it by two years, arriving in 1970. These two languages are basically twins separated at birth. Both give you pointers that touch raw memory. Both breathe right next to the assembly layer. Their design philosophies are practically incestuous.

This person confessed they used to wonder why Pascal and C even split into separate languages.

Then came the bombshell: if you actually erased C from history, Pascal would've seamlessly filled the void. C++, Java, C#—they'd all still exist, just with different names. P++. Pava. P#. Because before any language you want to strangle actually ships, there are five or six drafts sitting in the queue with nearly identical ideas.

Reading that, my brain made a sound I can only describe as bzzzt.

It perfectly explained every humbling experience I've had in this industry.

In 2016, I inherited a maintenance nightmare—a bank's core system running COBOL code written in 1987. My first thought: who the hell still uses this dinosaur? Then I learned that system processes billions in transactions daily. Rock solid. You want to delete COBOL? Sure. Just let the entire payment infrastructure collapse for three days first.

The Hospital Test Nobody Passes

There's this guy Bill Karwin—wrote SQL Antipatterns, total savage—who got asked which language he'd delete. His response was brutal. Paraphrasing:

"You're lying in a hospital bed. The doctor says, 'Sorry, we couldn't detect your heart attack because the monitoring machine runs FORTRAN, and some clever person on Quora wished FORTRAN out of existence.'"

How do you feel about that?

Seriously. How do you feel?

I've developed a visceral reaction to "X language is dead" content. Saw one of those "20 Most Important Programming Languages in History" listicles recently. They crammed Go in there—fine, whatever—but completely ignored ALGOL, Smalltalk, and ML. Then casually dismissed Pascal as "basically dead." I wanted to reach through the screen.

Pascal is dead?

ALGOL was born in 1960. Almost nobody writes ALGOL today. But the things it gave us—lexical scoping, structured programming, nested functions, code block structure, BNF grammar—this is the skeleton inside practically every mainstream modern language. Every if-else you write. Every code block wrapped in curly braces. That's ALGOL's bloodline running through your fingers. It didn't die. It got a complete makeover and now lives inside the code you type every single day.

The Plot Twist in NVIDIA's Security Strategy

This connects to something I stumbled on while researching NVIDIA last year—and that experience fried my brain, if I'm honest.

In 2022, NVIDIA's security team published a paper titled, I kid you not, "What Happens If We Stop Using C." I nearly fell out of my chair. This was literally the thought experiment brought to life. And they didn't just theorize—in 2018, they spent three months migrating two security-sensitive low-level applications from C to Ada/SPARK.

Ada/SPARK. What's that? Born in the 1980s for the U.S. Department of Defense's obsession with "reliable software." Design goals: high safety, high reliability, high maintainability. SPARK, a subset of Ada, can mathematically prove your code is free of runtime errors. NASA uses it for Mars rover software. Airbus uses it for flight control systems. NVIDIA recently got their DriveOS certified at ASIL-D—the highest automotive functional safety level—using Ada's strong type checking and formal verification.

A language most developers consider "too niche to have friends" is doing the hardest work in autonomous driving.

My Rust Adventure That Ended in Segmentation Faults

I got burned by this language reality in 2019. Needed to write firmware for an embedded device. Chose Rust—memory safety, very trendy, felt sophisticated about myself. Discovered the chip's compiler only supported C.

Typed C through gritted teeth. Segmentation faults. Everywhere. Two days of debugging hell.

Later, drinking with a friend who works in avionics, I asked why they still use Ada. His answer was perfect: "Switch to what? This has run for twenty years without failure."

Chef's kiss.

Something clicked for me then. A programming language isn't "good" or "bad" based on elegant syntax or cutting-edge features. It's about whether it can carry the weight in its specific domain. C's greatest strength? Absolute correctness. The language design has no controversial parts—because where there's controversy, C simply does nothing. Memory safety through RAII or GC? Unknown, so C has neither. Concurrency model? Stackful or stackless coroutines? Not our problem—users figure it out. Abstractions? void\* and good luck.

C has zero technical opinion about anything. Yet it can do everything.

It's never comfortable. But it's simple enough. Clear enough.

The Fossil Record of Engineering Decisions

The takeaway forming in my mind—no, let's call it what it is, a prejudice—goes like this: all Turing-complete languages have equivalent expressive power. Everything compiles down to machine code eventually. Delete one, another fills the gap. COBOL introduced structured record data—modern structs trace directly back to it. FORTRAN, 1957, the first real high-level language, still runs massive codebases in weather prediction and nuclear physics. BASIC, 1964, wanted ordinary people to learn programming—sound familiar? No-code platforms are chasing the exact same dream.

History moves in circles.

You can't erase it.

So back to the question: if I had to erase one programming language from history, which would I choose?

I'd pick one that's already truly dead.

Some academic toy language with three users, zero maintainers, and a compiler that 404s. Delete it, and hospital heart monitors keep beeping. Bank transaction systems stay online. Mars rovers don't drift into oblivion.

But honestly?

Even that language scares me.

Because what if one of its design ideas gets resurrected by a mainstream language thirty years from now?

Think about it.

ALGOL had few practitioners in its day. Now its soul animates every language we use.

Programming Languages Are Fossils, Not Tools

The more I sit with this, the more I believe programming languages aren't tools. They're fossils. Each one embeds the technical judgments and engineering compromises of its era. Scratch one fossil from the record, and you might have to rewrite the entire evolutionary tree.

So I've stopped participating in these debates entirely.

With that time I save, I maintain my fifteen-year-old Perl scripts instead.

Still running in production.

No, really.

They are.

Key Takeaways:

• Languages don't die—they ghost-haunt everything built after them. ALGOL's lexical scoping and structured programming are inside every modern language you use.
• Deletion fantasies ignore real-world consequences. FORTRAN runs heart monitors. COBOL powers banking infrastructure. Ada flies aircraft. You don't get to just "delete" them.
• Technically "niche" languages often do the most critical work. Ada/SPARK is running autonomous vehicle systems while developers argue about Rust vs. Go on Twitter.
• C's "weakness" is its strength. It has no opinions, so it works everywhere—uncomfortably, but reliably.
• History loops. BASIC wanted to democratize programming in 1964. No-code platforms are the 2024 version of the same impulse.

What's the oldest language you've encountered in production? Drop a comment—I genuinely want to hear your war stories.

programming #softwareengineering #legacycode #techhistory #ada