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Prolog is the future. Seriously. -ish. At least, if the future is languages like Oz and Alice ML (or watered-down mainstream variants like C-omega, and no I'm not making these up). It turns out that logic programming leads to declarative concurrency, which ties in nicely with the various calculi for concurrent processes that are currently so very hip. I am not an expert on these matters, but I play one on the internet. Forth isn't dead, but has gone undercover; I believe it is still in use in embedded systems, where its small-and-lightness-fu is much appreciated. A successor to Fortan is in the works, called Fortress - it seems that scientific/mathematical programming still needs a domain language all of its own. And COBOL obstinately refuses to die - possibly the signal from its hind-quarters has yet to reach its brain; or maybe it's like one of the Dark Judges (Judge Rigor Mortis, say), hissing "foolssss! you cannot kill what doesss not liiive!" (still-going? Lisp) evaluates to T. Computer science is still a young field, and the culture of programming languages is still a young culture - Alan Kay compared it recently to the consumer culture marketed at adolescents: exploitative and fad-driven, fuelled by the amnesiac repackaging and recycling of old ideas. C# is like Coldplay: nothing you haven't heard before, but nicely put-together. Dominic