CodeArchaeology

Nit is the statically typed, self-hosting object-oriented language that Jean Privat grew out of his PRM research compiler at LIRMM and has led since 2008 at UQAM in Montreal - a Pascal-and-Ruby-flavoured language in which everything is an object, classes inherit from several parents, any module can reopen and refine any class (even Int), types are flow-sensitive and nullable-aware, generics are covariant, and a compiler-to-C toolchain reaches Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and emscripten - first released under the Nit name on 9 July 2008, last released as v0.8 on 31 January 2016, and still receiving occasional commits in 2024 and 2026

Nice is the research language Daniel Bonniot built at INRIA Rocquencourt around the ML-Sub type system - a Java-syntax language for the JVM with multi-methods that dispatch on every argument, option types that make NullPointerException impossible by construction, parametric classes years before Java 5 generics, anonymous functions, tuples, named and optional parameters, abstract interfaces and design-by-contract - first published on SourceForge in October 2000, declared stable as 0.6 in July 2002, and last released as 0.9.13 in December 2007

Nial, the Nested Interactive Array Language, is the array language Mike Jenkins of Queen's University and Trenchard More of IBM built on More's array theory between 1979 and 1983 - APL's whole-array programming rewritten in ASCII words with Lisp-style nesting, functional combinators called transformers, and Pascal-like control structures - implemented by the portable C interpreter Q'Nial, sold by Nial Systems Limited from 1982, open-sourced as Version 6.3 in 2006 and re-released as the 64-bit Q'Nial 7 on GitHub in 2017

OmniMark is the streaming, rule-based text- and markup-processing language that Sam Wilmott designed at Exoterica Corporation in Ottawa for turning SGML (and later XML) documents into other things: a program is a set of find, element and translate rules that fire as data flows past, with an English-like pattern language in place of regular expressions and an element stack maintained by the built-in parser. Dated by its copyright notices to 1988 and sold commercially ever since - by Exoterica, by OmniMark Technologies (which gave version 5 away free in 1999 to challenge Perl), and since April 2001 by Stilo - it is a mainstay of the publishing industry's conversion pipelines and reached version 13 in May 2026

occam is the concurrent programming language that David May designed at Inmos in Bristol alongside the transputer instruction set, with Tony Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes as its model - a small, indentation-structured language in which SEQ and PAR say whether statements run in sequence or in parallel, processes talk only over synchronised channels with ? and !, and ALT waits on whichever of several events happens first; first published in April 1983, revised as occam 2 (1987-88) and occam 2.1 (1994-95), then extended at the University of Kent into occam-π on the open-source KRoC compiler, whose last tagged release was 1.6.0 in April 2013

A comprehensive catalog of 1,200+ programming languages from computing history, with dates, status, paradigms, and categories.