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According to the History of Programming Languages website (currently offline) there have been somewhere around 8500 programming languages developed since the Autocodes of the early 50s. The internet archive has scraped HOPL's taxonomy at least as well as a few references and at least the primary year indexes (the year of my birth, for example).
It's an open secret among language designers that many, perhaps most languages in that set are not very well specified. To explain what this means and why it's so is ... a bit complicated. I will try to explain a little bit about it here, as well as some of my history with it and some recent innovations in the field that have been getting my attention.
To anyone uninterested in language design, this is super boring stuff, and this entry turned out to be much longer and involve much more wandering backstory than the previous one, so as usual I'll cut it for brevity.
( specificities )
It's an open secret among language designers that many, perhaps most languages in that set are not very well specified. To explain what this means and why it's so is ... a bit complicated. I will try to explain a little bit about it here, as well as some of my history with it and some recent innovations in the field that have been getting my attention.
To anyone uninterested in language design, this is super boring stuff, and this entry turned out to be much longer and involve much more wandering backstory than the previous one, so as usual I'll cut it for brevity.
( specificities )