Sing a Song of ABC

From Darius Bacon:

A is for APL, with ciphers arrayed.
B is for BASIC, for kids and for trade.
C was successful, from Dennis, of course.
D is dead Dylan, entombed in closed source.
E is the language that limits your trust.
F is for FORTRAN and decks under dust.
G is for Goedel, a language of logic.
H is for Haskell's expression of magic.
I is for Intercal made up in fun.
J is for Java left under the sun.
K is APL sans its strange faces.
λ's for Lisp and its fond round embraces.
M is ML so your proofs are all sound.
N is the order of growth we must bound.
O for Oberon's slim binary tersity.
P is for Perl's postmodern perversity.
Q was QBASIC in Microsoft's youth.
R stands for art we were taught by Don Knuth.
S is for Smalltalk and corporate spending.
T is for types and flamewars unending.
U is for UML's silly CASE tools.
V is for Verilog -- hardware by rules.
W is web-code, the big killer app.
XML's X, better known as "that crap".
Y is recursion so self-referential?
Z specifies all that's essential.