   Bother with older languages?
  I''ve been programming for about 5 years or so (not counting my time spent programming stupid little games in QBasic) and I know a few languages pretty well (VB and pascal to name a couple), some I know only a very little bit of (IBM mainframe assembler for example), and C++ very well. I''d always planned on going back, though, and learning some older languages such as Fortran. But as I think now, is there really any reason to? I understand it''s probably a good experience and certainly couldn''t hurt, but I can''t help thinking I won''t take much from it. Not enough, that is, to outweigh spending the time learning something a little more...practical. What does everyone think?   When you find yourself in the company of a halfling and an ill-tempered Dragon, remember, you do not have to outrun the Dragon...
  Latin is pretty ancient and yet still people have to learn it at school, same with ancient greek.Of course ancient egypt or indo-roman are very interesting, but dead as well.In your post I saw some ancient languages that I have never heard of, where were QBasic and Fortran spoken and in what time? ;  Well, three I would recommend are Forth, Postscript and Lisp.Lisp and Postscript are both still used quite frequently today, and BSD''s boot loader is based on Forth. 