The programming world is full of languages that most developers no longer remember. However, they laid the foundations for many modern approaches. Here are five forgotten (but very important) languages that everyone should know.

COBOL appeared in 1959 and was created for business - its syntax resembled English, which made it accessible to “non-programmers”. It was widely used in banks, insurance and government agencies. Despite this, it lost popularity due to its reputation as an “old-fashioned” language and a lack of new personnel. Nevertheless, it showed the importance of writing clear, readable code - a lesson that is still relevant today.

Pascal, invented in 1970, became a favorite language for teaching. It taught good style and structured programming, Turbo Pascal was especially popular. However, it did not develop as a tool for real development and faded into the shadows when the boom of visual interfaces and the web began. Its merits — strict structure and readability — had a great influence on the education of programmers.

Lisp, created in 1958, was a revolutionary language: it was the first to introduce the ideas of functional programming, macros, and recursion. It was often used in artificial intelligence systems and in the scientific community. Despite this, its complex syntax (many brackets!) and non-standard nature prevented its widespread use. Today, its ideas live on in languages such as Clojure, Haskell, and even JavaScript.

Smalltalk (1972) — the progenitor of object-oriented programming, was the first language in which everything was an object. It also influenced the development of the GUI and the concept of IDEs. However, it was too slow, and its ecosystem did not go into widespread development. But thanks to it, the ideas on which Java, Python, and other OOP languages are built appeared.

Ada, created for the US Department of Defense in the 1980s, was focused on ultra-reliability and safety — it was used in aviation, defense, and medicine. However, due to the rigor and complexity of its development, it never became widespread. Its contribution is in demonstrating how important typing and error checking are in mission-critical systems. Conclusion: Forgotten languages are not the trash of history, but its foundation. Many of their ideas are still used today, just under different names. Understanding their strengths can make you a better developer.