PL/I and C are not from the 1950s:

PL/I was designed in IBM by a committee headed by George Radin in about 1963. First versions were running by 1966. Version 4 was running by 1969 and quite clean. There have been later versions. By the time IBM slowed maintaining the language, it was polished. Finally there was just one guy in CA maintaining PL/I. I suggested adding AVL trees (see Knuth, TACP).

The main intention of PL/I was to serve people using any or all of Cobol, Fortran, and assembler (at least for applications programming).

Again, versions of PL/I have been used for system programming in at least Multics and Primos.

It has been noted that the 1960s were "the golden age of programming language design". In comparison, progress for the next several decades was disappointing.

C was designed at Bell Labs in the 1970s. Likely the designers of C knew PL/I if only because they borrowed the semi-colon to end a statement and the syntax of comments.

C was supposed to be a minimal language, as simple as possible, to work on an 8 K DEC machine. The clever part of C was that while it had so little, with pointers, structures, malloc, and free, it still had enough for system programming. Also, since C was so simple, it needed no 'run-time' and could be used in embedded code in read only memory.

C++ was just a pre-processor to C to formalize some of the then standard ways to use C to make it livable for more complicated applications programming.

So, PL/I started off with much more than C. Since neither PL/I nor C can or will change, PL/I is still far ahead of C.

The preprocessor C++ is a bit ugly. Tough to say that just from a pre-processor C++ is much better than PL/I.

So, net, when Google asked me what my favorite programming language was, I said PL/I instead of the answer they wanted, C++.

I did not say that PL/I was the ultimate programming language, the end of programming language design, a programming language for 10,000 machines with 10 processors each with 1000 cores, etc. I didn't say that people should convert to PL/I. But, then, I would feel sorry for anyone to start a new project with C or C++.

I had my fling with programming language design with KnowledgeTool and a subsequent project. At the time I looked at the literature of programming language design and was not impressed. To me the literature looked like it was just rehashing old ideas back to Algol, looked like 'research' in cooking that was just remixing Escoffier's collection of sauces.

If since then the design of programming languages, compilers, operating systems, etc. have made progress, then about time and good.

For what is 'practical' now, I've voted with my feet: At present, I'm concentrating on my project in applications programming and am using essentially just Visual Basic .NET, ADO.NET for getting to SQL Server, ASP.NET for Web pages, and .NET for some of the other functionality it has, e.g., a lot in time and date manipulation.

That Microsoft went for their common language runtime (CLR), 'managed code', 'garbage collection' (with memory 'compactification'), common 'intermediate language', invited others to write their own syntactic sugar on top of the these, and provided the syntactic sugar C# and Visual Basic strikes me as good for now.

For my project, I decided to stand on Microsoft Windows instead of flavors of Unix. On Microsoft, I went with Visual Basic (VB) .NET. So far Windows and VB .NET have been as promised. I miss some of the features of PL/I, but the missing features don't keep me from getting my work done.

The VB .NET complier has been terrific: It compiles my programs in time in practice for me equivalent to 0 seconds. I will never type in enough code to slow down that compiler. The error messages, including in the context of ASP.NET, have been quite nice. I've found no bugs at all. The compiler has been easy to use just from command lines driven by some simple ObjectRexx scripts. I'm thrilled.

The main problem I have in my software development is some of Microsoft's documentation: (1) It is horrendous, thousands of Web pages, and, thus, tough to work with, even when it is good. (2) For SQL Server, especially management and administration, especially the 'security model', and a lot more in Windows, the documentation was awful in ways that have cost me unbelievable time and effort: Things didn't work anything like promised; I had to mount side projects to diagnose the problems and work around them; I had to write my own documentation, develop my own scripts to lock in the solutions, etc. to get around the nonsense and get back to my work, etc. It was horrendously expensive.

But, just for a programming language that is practical for applications programming now, I selected VB .NET. I certainly didn't try to continue with PL/I.

All this started just because Google asked me what my favorite programming language was and I said PL/I instead of C++ like they wanted. My answer was fine. The HR-recruiter rube didn't see PL/I on their list of acceptable answers and ended the interview. That was Google's error, not mine.