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I would expand this list with: perl(mostly-dead influential), and ceylon and coffescript(these last ones mostly-dead and not so influential, let's be honest).

I also would say that ruby is a future mostly-dead language, but I don't want to sound too controversial.



CoffeeScript might just be one of the most influential languages. Tons of ES6 features were directly inspired by CoffeeScript and ES6+ JavaScript is the most popular language in the world right now.


I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm not denying that coffescript might have inspired ES6+ features, but from this to say that it's a very influential, let alone one of the most influential languages, is a big leap. In my opinion, of course.


Each of the languages on the list influenced many subsequent languages, not just one.


> I also would say that ruby is a future mostly-dead language, but I don't want to sound too controversial.

Aren't you just saying it anyway? Why do you think this?


I developed a lot of projects with ruby and yet I can't think of a single reason to opt for ruby over python or typescript. Ruby doesn't do anything better both in terms of language or platform than its already very well established competitors.

It's my understanding that ruby rose to prominence mostly because of ruby on rails, now that RoR is in a downward trend I think ruby will follow the same trend until it's reduced to a small community of enthusiasts in the same way that happened to perl.


I can think of one, Ruby has a very healthy ecosystem for web development, with a very dominant an popular framework. A lof ot big companies seem to be invested on it to some degree. I don't think it has the brightest future and it might have a long but steady decline ahead, but I don't think risk of immediate dead.

(This is not to talk about the merits of the language, which it's really orthogonal to popularity).




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