> only insofar as they have affected currently important languages
If this is meant to be any kind of history, that would seem to be grounds for inclusion. After all, Bourne Shell gets a spot, even though it's not actually a language and hasn't influenced any other language to any significant degree (unless you consider Tcl and even that's a big stretch). It seems like many things were included merely as excuses to express like or dislike, without any regard for historical importance or relevance. The fact that it favors C++ over alternatives might please some, but doesn't make it a good article.
It's also marked "Unlikely to influence anything in the future, due to remarkably poor design", yet there's still a line drawn from it.... to Erlang?? but not Perl.
You will find an increasing incidence of pipe forms ("X | Y | Z" meaning something akin to "Z(Y(X))", but different) in current languages. C++ and Rust both use it, and Haskell has a variation.
So it contributed one character? The same concept has been in many functional and concatenative languages since even before sh, and those are more likely to have inspired contemporary languages. The influence of absent Simula or Algol is multiple orders of magnitude greater than sh, so the point about the arbitrary standard for inclusion still stands.
Bourne shell is most practicing programmers' first exposure to language features supporting safe concurrency without locks or shared storage. Those features are still finding their way into C++.
And no, it is not the same concept.
When was the last time you had any contact with a running Algol or Simula program? I use sh -- bash, really -- every day.
> Those features are still finding their way into C++.
Not the only area in which C++ is 30 years (and counting) behind state of the art.
> When was the last time
The OP is supposedly about history, thus current usage is irrelevant. There's no longer a Mongol Empire either, but its existence is still historically important and only the worst kind of dilettante would try to write a history of the world without mentioning it.
Yet, other languages are, also, only just getting similar features.
The author seems to prefer to mention languages that are still taught and used, and to neglect those that are not. It being an "opinionated" history, I can only find fault where he breaks his own rules. Maybe he should mention Korn shell, for example, which became Posix shell and bash. But only Bourne shell features affected modern languages.
The exception is COBOL, which is still important in the way FORTRAN and Java are, but similarly will not affect future languages.