The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

I think they are not. No amount of type level extensions can turn a regular functional language like Haskell into something suitable for theorem proving. Adding dependent types to Haskell, for example, doesn't suffice. To build a theorem prover you need to take away some capability (namely, the ability to do general recursion - the base language must be total and can't be Turing complete), not add new capabilities. In Haskell everything can be "undefined" which means that you can prove everything (even things that are supposed to be false).

There's some ways you can recover Turing completeness in theorem provers. You can use effects like in F* (non-termination can be an effect). You can separate terms that can be used in proofs (those must be total) from terms that can only be used in computations (those can be Turing complete), like in Lean. But still, you need the base terms to be total, your logic is done in the fragment that isn't Turing complete, everything else depends on it.

I mean, programming languages do not live; and they do not "die", per se, either. Just the usage may go down towards 0.

COBOL would then be close to extinction. I think it only has a few niche places in the USA and perhaps a very few more areas, but I don't think it will survive for many more decades to come, whereas I think C or python will be around in, say, three decades still.

> family with horizontal gene transfer

Well, you refer here to biology; viruses are the most famous for horizontal gene transfer, transposons and plasmids too. But I don't think these terms apply to software that well. Code does not magically "transfer" and work, often you have to adjust to a particular architecture - that was one key reason why C became so dynamic. In biology you basically just have DNA, if we ignore RNA viruses (but they all need a cell for their own propagation) 4 states per slot in dsDNA (A, T, C, G; here I exclude RNA, but RNA is in many ways just like DNA, see reverse transcriptase, also found in viruses). So you don't have to translate much at all; some organisms use different codons (mitochondrial DNA has a few different codon tables) but by and large what works in organism A, works in organism B too, if you just look to, say, wish to create a protein. That's why "genetic engineering" is so simple, in principle: it just works if you put genes into different organisms (again, some details may be different but e. g. UUU would could for phenylalanine in most organisms; UUU is the mRNA variant of course, in dsDNA it would be TTT). Also, there is little to no "planning" when horizontal gene transfer happens, whereas porting requires thinking by a human. I don't feel that analogy works well at all.

Code: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

The EPUB looks broken in my machine, try the PDF: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Norvig._Paradi...

Altough Scheme and CL are different paths. CL's loop it's really, really complex and Scheme it's pretty much straightforward to understand. Any advanced CL user will have to implement Scheme's syntax (and an interpreter) as an exercise for PAIP. CL in CL... well, CL is too huge, T3X tried with Kilo Lisp 23 http://t3x.org/klisp/22/index.html and I doubt if anyone can even complete anything but the few starting chapters from Intro to Common Lisp with it.

Of Lem with SBCL+Quicklisp:

https://lem-project.github.io/usage/common_lisp/

Huge tip: if you use MCCLIM, install Ultralisp first and (ql-quickload 'mcclim) later: it will give you a big speed boost. Big, not as the ones from Phoronix. Actually big. From 'I can almost see redrawing on a really old ass netbook' to 'snappy as TCL/Tk' under SBCL.

https://ultralisp.org/

As you can see, you don't need to pay thousands of dollars.

For Scheme, S9 just targets R4RS but as a start it's more than enough, and for SICP you can install Emacs+Geiser+chicken Scheme and from any Linux/BSD: distro command prompt, you run:

       sudo  chicken-install srfi-203
       sudo chicken-install srfi-216

      (import scheme)
      (import (srfi 203))
      (import (srfi 216))

       csi yourfile.scm 

       chicken-csi yourfile.scm

         M-x install RET geiser-chicken

 if you are lazy. You can install the SICP book with

        M-xpackage-install RET sicp

       M-x info RET

      M-x geiser 

Advice to juniors (say) to spend time learning multiple programming languages over good command of a single one, deep expertise in LLM use and basic software engineering principles is going to severely undermine their value in an already tough field for entrants. For seniors there will generally already be a reasonable grounding in multiple paradigms; delving much further into legacy manual coding styles is going to see them leapfrogged by experts in modern (ie AI-assisted) approaches.