> > there is a very real sense in which programming languages haven’t really progressed since the early 80s.

> 1980 is the debut of Smalltalk.

1972, actually!

> Standardisation of CommonLisp happened sometimes in the mid 1980s.

Finished in the mid 90s. But Lisp was around well before the 80s, and CL was in a lot of ways a standardisation of the practices developed in the 70s & 80s.

> 80s. The 1990s is the "Interpreters Renaissance", when Python and Ruby (and other less elegant siblings) came out

I don’t really count that as progress. Python is just an unacceptable Lisp (1958), and Ruby is by analogy an unacceptable Smalltalk (1972).

> … the JVM and the proto-beginnings of the CLR.

The JVM is just refinement of ideas dating back to UCSD Pascal (1977), and the CLR is just an embraced and extended JVM.

> The 1980s and 1990s was an era of massive interest in Partial Evaluation, the revolutionary idea with consequences such as deriving a compiler out of an interpreter automatically.

Emanuelson & Haraldsson wrote about partial evaluation in Lisp in their 1980 paper On compiling embedded languages in LISP.

> Haskell? 1990, and only popular beginning in the late 2000s\early 2010s. LLVM? early 2000s. SML? OCaml? F#? Scala? Erlang? Rust? Clojure? Perl and its legacy in Raku? Julia? Mathematica?

Haskell was strongly influenced by Miranda (1985), and of course based on Hadley-Milner (1969/1978), albeit with improvements. I’ll grant you that Wadler & Blott’s typeclass proposal date to the late 80s. What about LLVM is fundamental progress rather than refinement of existing work? Standard ML dates back to the early 80s: 1983. ML itself dates to the early 70s. OCaml is OO ML, a marriage of a language from the early 80s and a concept from the early 60s (Simula dates back to 1962). F# is another member of the ML (1973) family. ‘Something old, but this time on a new VM!’ isn’t really progress, is it? Scala is OO (60s) plus functional programming (50s). Erlang appeared in 1986, so I will grant that it’s just outside of my ‘early 80s’ comment. But did it progress as a language or as a runtime? Granted the boundaries are fuzzy. I’m not familiar with the scholarship which influenced Rust — it may genuinely have a few ideas which don’t date back to the late 70s/early 80s. I imagine someone here can educate me! Clojure is ‘not-really-Lisp, but on the JVM’; is that really progress as opposed to refinement? Not that refinement is unimportant! Perl’s origin in 1988 is past the early 80s, but … is there really much original there? Especially in its early versions it was basically a better awk (1977). I am not familiar with Raku, but it doesn’t really look original, but more like a polishing of Perl. Julia’s big thing is multiple dispatch, right? That dates back to the early 70s, so it can’t really be counted as an innovation in a language from a decade ago. Finally, Mathematica dates to the late 80s, so definitely outside the window I gave, but isn’t there a substantial overlap between its functionality on one hand and Lisp/Macsyma on the other?

Edit: reformatted to not make this a huge string of paragraphs. Instead, it’s a wall of text. Dunno if that is an improvement. Do let me know …