COBOL, Lisp and Logo Get New Life Among Coders

Old programming languages are getting a new lease on life through modern interpreters, thanks to developers with time to spare.

Here are three languages, up to 50 years old, that you can play with today because of creative interpretations. Current usage rankings are from the TIOBE Programming Community index for September 2016.

Why Old Languages Get New Interpreters

An interpreter is a program that reads code and runs it directly, rather than turning it into a standalone application first. Writing one for an old language in a modern environment is a neat trick: suddenly code written for a 1960s mainframe or a 1980s school computer can run inside a web app or a Python script.

Some of these projects are just for fun. Others solve real problems, like connecting old business logic to new systems without rewriting it. Either way, they show how long good ideas in programming can last.

COBOL: Still Running the Back Office

Language: COBOL
Designed: 1959
Current popularity: 24th
Implemented in: Node.js

Developer Bizău Ionică has made it easy to run COBOL in a Node.js web application. Once an interpreter is installed server-side, COBOL can be executed within Javascript.

An interpretation on a quickly scaleable platform is a big deal for clunky COBOL, which is famously verbose. The language was designed to be human-readable in business systems and some legacy code is still in use today.

Just how much is still in use became clear in April 2020. As unemployment claims surged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy put out a call for volunteers who know COBOL, because many of the state’s systems still ran on older mainframes. CNN reported that Kansas and Connecticut were dealing with similar problems. “Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” Murphy said.

Lisp: The Language of Early AI

Language: Lisp
Designed: 1958
Current usage: 28th
Implemented in: Python

The powerful list processing language, Lisp, had its heyday in the 1970s with early artificial intelligence research. Hy (Github link) allows you to code in Lisp and gives access to the Python Abstract Syntax Tree. Like COBOL in Node.js, Hy also lets developers embed directly into Python programs by importing the module.

Lisp is still in use today through its modern dialect, Clojure, which is used by companies including Netflix. If you want to play with Lisp through Hy, cathode-ray-tube screen and all, you can experiment here.

Hy has kept going, too. After years of development, the project released version 1.0.0 in September 2024, a milestone that signals the language is stable enough to rely on. Its official site describes Hy as a Lisp dialect embedded in Python, with direct access to Python’s built-in features and its huge range of third-party libraries.

Logo: Teaching Kids to Think Like Programmers

Language: Logo
Designed: 1967
Current usage: 36th
Implemented in: HTML5

Ex-schoolchildren of a certain age will remember building programs to direct an electronic turtle to draw ferns and flowers – lucky users might even have been able to program a “real life” turtle, a kind of proto-Roomba.

While Logo has few practical industry uses, the language has been introducing children to programming concepts such as flow control and recursion for decades, although other languages such as Scratch are more popular now.

As the basic version of the language results in visual output, it makes sense that people have created HTML5/CSS3 interpretations. One of the most faithful and child-friendly, which includes animation, is this from Logo Interpreter.

Logo’s best-known champion, MIT’s Seymour Papert, died in July 2016 at the age of 88, just weeks before this article was written. MIT News noted that Papert invented the small mobile robot known as the “Logo Turtle” for children’s play and problem-solving, and that LEGO named its Mindstorms robotics kits after his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Scratch, Logo’s successor in many classrooms, was developed at the MIT Media Lab, where Papert was a founding faculty member.

Where They Stand Now

A decade later, the rankings tell an interesting story. In the TIOBE index for October 2026, COBOL had climbed to 16th place, up from 24th in September 2016. Lisp had slipped to 36th, and Logo had dropped out of the top 50 altogether. Scratch, meanwhile, sat at 15th, just ahead of COBOL.

Scratch’s own community statistics show how far block-based coding for kids has come: more than 135 million registered users and more than 164 million shared projects. Logo’s big idea, that children learn best by making things, is alive and well, even if the turtle has mostly been retired.

TIOBE calculates its ratings from popular websites such as Google, Wikipedia and Bing, and states that the index isn’t about the language in which most lines of code have been written. So it measures attention rather than how much code is actually running. That’s especially relevant for COBOL, where huge amounts of working code sit quietly inside banks and government systems without anyone searching for it.

Why It Matters for Developers

The lesson from all three languages is that code tends to outlive the plans made for it. COBOL programs written for decades-old hardware were still processing unemployment claims in 2020. Lisp’s ideas live on in modern languages and in projects like Hy. Logo’s approach to teaching shaped the tools a new generation learns on.

For developers and founders, that’s a good reason to write code that’s readable and well documented, even when it feels like a quick fix. Someone may be relying on it long after you’ve moved on, and they’ll thank you for it.

See also

Investors Weigh in on Programming Language Choice