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Arc is on the list, but considering its creator (PG) and the founder of YCombinator and HN (also PG) then maybe not so surprising.

What's the criteria for a language being "obscure?" I consider Erlang an obscure language but I'd bet that most people do not. Does it need to have less than a certain % userbase?

What criteria determines a language being "rediscovered all the time?" One post about that language per month? one per year? I don't remember seeing a front page post about several of those languages for quite some time.

Probably something close to: there doesn't exist a subreddit for the language. But with that in mind, Coq (at least) needs to come off that list. The 6 /r/mumps users might actually more meaningfully support its obscurity.
> I consider Erlang an obscure language but I'd bet that most people do not.

Me too, but Elixir's going to be massive and may take Erlang with it. It feels like the first year of node coming out.

Im not sure I would call Erlang obscure any more, it has stories that end up on the front page often, with plenty of comments, is being used at a fair number of companies now.

Sure it is not as well known as languages like Java, C, and Python, but there is only a dozen or languages at that point.

Personally (and this is certainly not an absolute way to call this), I would say a language like Erlang and Haskell are fringe languages, where as languages like IO and Self are obscure.

HN loves talking about obscure languages, so this is just going to turn into a "list of obscure languages". :-)

That said, you could possibly consider Forth, which has some users, but is relatively obscure to most people.

Also, Fortress.

How about Chapel or X10?