The seven programming ur-languages (2021)

The comments here are interesting, lots of possibilities for other ur-languages. My suggestion is macro based languages. Macro based programming predates all programming languages other than ASM[1]. The simple macro systems, like early assemblers provided, aren't ur-languages, but once macros can expand other macros and generate definitions of new macros, the macro systems can become general purpose programming systems. The two earliest macro systems that were clearly designed to be general purpose languages that…

We got to build mini versions of the first 4 languages (imperative, lisp, ML, Smalltalk) in the PL course at tufts which is now published as a textbook [1]. There used to be a prolog part that sadly got cut. [1]: https://www.cambridge.org/ir/universitypress/subjects/comput...

At the end every syntax is just a wrapper over the instruction set. What matters is how efficiently it translates to that instructions and is it helping or limiting the developer. In reality every target platform already has main development language that can link and use all API. So one have to select target platform not language