Also, as was obscured by the title mangler, the "dead" in the title is just a side remark; the title without the parenthesis is "10 most influential programming languages", and "(ly dead)" after "most" is just a parenthesis.

Maybe we'll just revert to the linkbaity title in this case. I had it briefly as "Mostly-dead, influential programming languages (2020)" but that probably did more harm than good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: that didn't work. I'm just going to take the whole 'dead' thing out.

Just curious: How do you determine whether the title change worked? Do you try it out and then check back later to see whether commenters are still getting hung up on the topic?

Yes, but less reliably than that.

Well, it's not a claim that these are the ten most influential programming languages. Lisp was clearly more influential than most of these, but it didn't make the list because it's still alive.

I think the title was mostly just a pun/riff on the title of the other post linked in the first paragraph, which did claim to be a list of the most influential languages, and doesn't really make sense if read as a specific concrete claim.

Think the author saw a way to sneak in a 'Princess Bride' reference and took it.