For me, it was my fourth programming language, after BASIC, PDP-8 assembly language, and PDP-8 binary (yes, I wrote binary code so I could toggle it in on the front panel of an early minicomputer).

When I originally drafted this article in early 2023, I threw the classic "Hello, world" programming assignment against the 12 most popular languages in O'Reilly Media's popularity rankings for 2023.

BASIC wasn’t designed to change the world. “We were thinking only of Dartmouth,” says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (Kemeny died in 1992.) “We needed a language that could be ‘taught ...