CodeArchaeology

A scripting language recorded in the packet-radio niche and dated only to the 1990s - and a case study in a language whose sole surviving trace is its catalogue entry, hidden behind an acronym that ham radio, Japanese paper dolls and an engineering slogan all got to first

TINCL, The Idiotically Named CGI Language, is a template-and-C preprocessor written in 1998 by Ben Olmstead - the creator of Malbolge - for writing CGI programs at the Colorado School of Mines. A TINCL source file is divided into named sections, mixes literal HTML with escaped blocks of C, and is compiled by a flex-based translator into a C program; the language was never taken past beta, and its distribution archive is lost

MarketScript was the postfix command language embedded in MarketSheet, the real-time trading-room display product built by Teknekron Software Systems (later TIBCO) around 1990. Traders wrote scripts like INDU find select red fill on buttons and price alerts to recolour, hide, move and navigate the live market-data sheets on their screens; it had no arithmetic, no variables and no control flow, and it survives today almost entirely inside a patent

TERSE is a one-man commercial programming language for the Intel x86, written by Jim Neil of Melbourne, Florida: a symbolic, free-format, machine-level notation in which eax = ebx; means Mov eax,ebx and { dx-; }<>; is a whole loop. The compiler emits .ASM text rather than object code so that any Intel-mnemonic assembler can act as its back end, it shipped on a single 1.44 MB diskette with a 220-page bound manual for $49, and terse.com is still selling that DOS diskette today

Tiger is the small imperative language Andrew W. Appel invented for his Modern Compiler Implementation textbooks: an Algol-family language with heap-allocated records, nested functions and an ML-flavoured expression syntax, designed not to be programmed in but to be compiled - by students. Nobody ships software in Tiger; many thousands of students have written a compiler for it.

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