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Goodbye, World? 5 Languages That Might Not Be Long For This World
Nerval's Lobster writes As developers embrace new programming languages, older languages can go one of two ways: stay in use, despite fading popularity, or die out completely. So which programming languages are slated for history's dustbin of dead tech? Perl is an excellent candidate, especially considering how work on Perl6, framed as a complete revamp of the language, began work in 2000 and is still inching along in development. Ruby, Visual Basic.NET, and Object Pascal also top this list, despite their onetime popularity. Whether the result of development snafus or the industry simply veering in a direction that makes a particular language increasingly obsolete, time comes for all platforms at one point or another. Which programming languages do you think will do the way of the dinosaurs in coming years?
With COBOL still around, it's hard to take too seriously the claim that Perl or Ruby is about to die. A prediction market for this kind of thing might yield a far different list.
You shouldn't have made Perl and Ruby #1 and #2 respectively. Of course being on dice.com should have been enough.
On the plus side, I didn't waste much time reading the rest of the BS.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Some people like to make a big deal over languages dying, particularly if the language is one that they never really liked. I say, why make a fuss? Sure, some languages will decrease in popularity, but they're still there to use if you want, and there will always be a die-hard community of fans that keep it alive. Why hold a big whoop-de-doo circus to celebrate the ebb and flow of language popularity?
Once a language is adopted by a large organization, it is almost impossible for it to go extinct. Just the way that larger companies tend to work, means that the language will exist in some form for decades. If I were to predict a language to go extinct, I would say that it has to be one that has not been widely adopted already, has not made its way to mainstream organizations, and basically reproduces what is already done by another, more popular, language.
His main complaints about Ruby seem to be that C programmers find it hard to use (because C is at the forefront of innovative computer languages, you know), and that Twitter has stopped using it (oh noes!).
Once upon a time brainfuck was all the rage...bla bla
I work in an engineering firm. There's so much legacy Perl out there that there'll be a need for it for at least another decade.
As for VB, it'll remain as long as Microsoft Office is used in companies. It's way too handy and there's no alternative.
Beetle B.
These languages may not be the "cool" languages at the moment, but to say they are "dead tech" (or even on their way) is classic hyperbole, and /.'s owner dice should be ashamed for soliciting ad views with this nonsense.
I suppose this is where I'm supposed to be indignant because the language I use got listed. But, I suppose it's fair. Ruby has always been one of the trendier languages, regardless of its utility.
Really struggling to avoid defending it, though.
Perl 6 might be languishing in academia but in the meantime Perl 5 is chugging along nicely with bug fixes released regularly and CPAN content growing week over week. Not to mention Debian and BSD's heavy use of Perl in the base system.
They can have my Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
I don't see Logo getting much use these days. ;-)
I would agree with the Ruby and Object Pascal and tentatively agree on the VB.Net.
Ruby given worse language breakage than Python 2->3, or any of the minor releases in either major version. Object Pascal because other than Delphi and fpc, what support is there for it? And VB.Net, given microsoft's supposedly plans to toss the whole .Net ecosystem seems like a real possibility.
That said, neither perl nor cobol seem likely to go away anytime soon given that both serve a valuable niche, and compared to the aforementioned languages, have far less syntax, API and ABI breakages during any particular version upgrade than the former trio have.
Although one could argue that Ada died a long time ago. Lisp seems to settled into being an MIT- and emacs- house language.
OTOH I think Perl has a ways to go. Ask me again in 6-8 years.
Also on the list: Adobe Flash. Please let them be correct about this. No more Flash. Anywhere. Ever.
I hate JavaScript. It's like all the worst attributes of every language all rolled into one. And as my career progresses, I do more and more JavaScript.
This is why I don't waste my time with Python. There will always be a latest and greatest scripting language to come along and replace the previous one. We all know that real code is written in C/C++, but it seems that in the corporate world this has been deemed too difficult to understand. The recent trend that I've noticed is to create your system from piles of scripted modules. Also, part of the complexity in C++ is self inflicted. Years ago, C++ code was like a more flexible C - but with cool objects that you could use to create flexible, inheritable objects. More recently, people have taken the whole template aspect to an extreme and it (in my opinion) has really screwed the whole thing up.
"Perl is an excellent candidate, especially considering how work on Perl6, framed as a complete revamp of the language, began work in 2000 and is still inching along in development."
This does not imply that Perl is on its way out. I don't use the language myself (I despise it, personally), but I know many who use it on a daily basis. It is still a go-to language for many programmers (albeit, who may no longer be in their 20s) who need to quickly hack together a test harness for a larger system. It could merely be that Perl is "complete" for applications where it is useful. Further revision is no longer necessary.
Also, I'd hardly say that C++ is on it's way out, even though C++11 took so long to be ratified.
A friend of mine is currently re-writing some old ADA code.
What, never heard of ADA? It's based on PASCAL. It was a contractual DoD standard for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Goodbye, World? 5 Languages That Might Not Be Long For This World
Appears to use a phrase I do not understand.
Fortran: will live forever
Cobol: ditto
PL/1: probably a goner
Pascal: is that still around?
LISP: was already for hipsters only by the 80's
Have you read my blog lately?
With COBOL still around, it's hard to take too seriously the claim that Perl or Ruby is about to die.
Why would you make that assumption? Have Perl or Ruby been suggested as replacements for COBOL? Is the future usefulness of a language based inversely on age? I'm not seeing the direct connection between the lifespans of COBOL, Perl, and Ruby.
Also, how can they not mention FORTRAN in the article? No self respecting article on the topic of "soon to be dead programming languages" in the last 30 years has failed to mention FORTRAN. I see it as a staple of these articles for years to come.
We got the kids a Kano. Daughter 1 asks, "Do you two know how to program?" Parents, "Does the Kano have Turbo Pascal?" Daughter 2, "Is that like some kind of 80s cartoon character?"
Perl as an application language or a way to do web sites is probably dying but that was never the primary purpose of the language in the first place. I have yet to see a better cross platform scripting language for systems administration tasks.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, in unmaintained hardware burried deep in your organization.
It will not be anything I know how to name. It will be the obscure ones that most people on /. haven't heard of.
no chance we could add a 6th eh?
Look at human languages. They die when the last person speaking them dies. What makes anyone think computer languages are different?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Before making a prediction, you have to define "death". If it's the complete absence of users of the language, then the answer is easy: no language ever dies. There'll always be somebody in some obscure corner of the planet who'll know and use it from time to time.
From TFA:
I'd say that MS's love of BASIC goes back at least a decade before that; they wrote the ROM BASIC for the TRS-80 (as I found when doing a PEEK scan through it).
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
I think it's pretty safe to say that we can dismiss claims that perl is dying as pure rubbish. Sure, the language isn't as trendy as ruby or whatever the new hotness is but it's still a language that is used by thousands of companies and applications every day and will continue to be used for quite some time.
Sure, some languages will decrease in popularity, but they're still there to use if you want, and there will always be a die-hard community of fans that keep it alive.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that skills in the language will help you put food on the table. For example, if one popular client platform requires that all programs be written in C#,* and another requires either Objective-C++ or Swift, and another requires Java,** and another requires JavaScript,*** then companies hiring programmers will disproportionately demand those languages.
* The platforms I'm thinking of require verifiably type-safe CIL compatible with the .NET Compact Framework, which in practice means C#.
** Or another language that compiles to 100% pure JVM bytecode.
*** Or another language that compiles to JavaScript, even on JSVMs that don't specifically accelerate asm.js.
Pascal: Delphi still lives.
Here are the dead and dying languages
1) Perl - because it's a "piecemeal" language with features pile atop one another
2) Ruby - because its difficult to learn if you know C
3) Visual Basic.Net - because C#
4) Adobe Flash & AIR - because iPhone
5) Delphi Object Pascal - because it isn't well-supported
Now you don't need to read the article
I mean Dart and Go particularly.
Lets be honest here, Perl is sticking around for awhile, it's more widely used than people realize, especially in the realm of bitcoin applications/interfaces with the hardware miners, so needless to say Perl has been picking up more traction due to that alone in the last couple years, not to mention RaspberryPi's and all the other DIY boards that have become popular. However for the other languages on that list, (at least my personal opinion)... Ruby seems like it died awhile back, it was a very short lived language in the eyes of many true developers. I personally saw the biggest gain/support of Ruby from "script kiddez", which also made me shake my head. VB.NET has seen to be on it's why out for some time, the last time I can even remember coding in VB was VB 3.0, granted it was useful back then, for certain aspects. Adobe Flash & AIR, Flash's wide adoption, basically due to very few options at the time when Flash reigned supreme made it so popular, but it's absolutely horrid these days, the fact it's held on this long is a complete mind-fuck, one can only attribute that due to the wide adoption, of which companies/people aren't willing to pay/learn enough to move away from it. One can only PRAISE the day Flash is complete no more. Objective Pascal, yup, that's dead, somewhere in the far corners of the world we have a few developers trying to maintain some code base, begging the higher ups to re-write it in another language.
Pascal was/is a much better language than Fortran or Cobol.
I would be shocked if it completely died out.
The one I wonder about is Java. It has sort of replaced Cobol as the language that you use to write programs that no one ever sees but will it keep that place now that Oracle bought it. I know that it is the language of choice for Android and that IBM and other people have their own JVMs but will Oracles lawyers kill it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've heard that Latin is a "dead" language, but people refer to it all the time, and even act smug if they know it!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Too bad. It was the most terse language ever created.
What we'd want to see is a ranking of languages by "new project starts" utilizing that language. There's still COBOL around but how many new projects are started that use COBOL? Etc. I suspect few people starting a project today that requires a Perl-like language would actually choose Perl unless they were already a Perl expert and it was definitely going to be a one-man job. They'd choose Python/Ruby/PHP instead. So, in that sense, Perl is dead.
A language dies when there are no longer programmers who are able to code in it. The langauge literally dies as people retire and die off. Well documented languages that are simple to learn will never die. COBAL is dying as a useful language as new programmers stop learning it and people retire. Economics still provide enough incentive for people to learn the language so it is dying slowly. They things listed at the top are still on peoples resumes. So they are not dying
We use it in power systems, we use it in scientific labs around the world.
Nice try.
Hey. I am/was a hipster - wow!
Fortran, Cobol will be around for years. PL/1 may well have died, I last used it back in the 80's. Apparently Pascal is still being taught at some 6th forms round Cambridge so not dead yet, just retiring gracefully.
LISP - ah I remember it well... um with affection... bit rusty on that one but what a language. You young un's don't know you're born. When I were but a nipper we used to code all day in Lisp only taking tea breaks during garbage collections.
Of course C# is tending towards Lisp with every release. The introduction of Linq giving you the missing anonymous lambda functions so beloved of us cryptic coders in Lisp.
The programming expert who wrote that article provided Pascal code that probably won't compile because of a missing "END" statement.
"Pascal: is that still around?" - by 14erCleaner (745600) on Thursday October 09, 2014 @11:07AM (#48102753) Homepage
Doing a job more efficiently w/ less parts vs. inferior competitors http://developers.slashdot.org... written in other languages...
* :)
APK
P.S.=> That answer your question? It should - it's LITERALLY living proof thereof... apk
I still hack around in Pascal from time to time. Kyan Pascal produces good results on my Apple IIe when I'm in the mood, and I dink around on System 7 from time to time on my old Quadra and all the libraries and toolkits for the Mac from back then are better supported in Pascal.
I don't think it has any practical use nowadays, even with Lazarus out there, but it's still fun if you're into the vintage scene.
Microsoft's Very First product, written before Bill Gates even dropped out of college, was BASIC for the Altair 8k. This dates it back to '75.
They're not dead, they're just resting. The real problem is languages that were born retarded, like javascript. And were then shaken vigorously and given a bag of paint thinner to huff on, just in case that helps perk them up. Yeah, node.js, drooling over in the corner, I'm calling back to you.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imum Century
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
Abstract
This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl. The paper also explains the special source filtering and parsing techniques required to efficiently interpret a programming language in which the syntax is (largely) non-positional.
Whose writing programs in PL/1 these days?
What about Delphi? Whose writing Delphi apps these days?
How about Cold Fusion?
What about ActionScript. After standing up the Air platform they've basically abandoned it as a language.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
By far, doing more with less (= good engineering) + better overall architecture http://developers.slashdot.org...
* Object Pascal/Delphi, rules...
APK
P.S.=> I program literally a dozen++ languages fluently since 1982 (new ones come easy too - they're now MOSTLY an "Object.Property Method" paradigm is why in "RAD" tools) - THAT was my fav. since 1997 & with GOOD reason via concrete, verifiable & UNDENIABLE facts from tests!
When I saw Delphi LITERALLY blow away my then 2 former favs in MSVC++ & VB by MORE THAN DOUBLE in strings + math work (which, mind you, EVERY program does work in) in benchmarks performed in, of all places, a COMPETING TRADE JOURNAL (Visual Basic Programmer's Journal Sept./Oct. issue titled "Inside the VB5 Compiler") & overall, iirc, in 5/7 total tests (db work, strings, math, textbox form loads, activeX, graphics, & ) - losing only once to MSVC++ (textbox form loads, by a PUNY margin too) & VB (which even MSVC++ did on ActiveX) ... apk
I have become so tired of these people who try to make engineering into a fashion show. "You wrote you code in what language? OMG, that's sooo 5 minutes ago"...
Languages are tools. Use the one that is appropriate for the task. Stop inventing "new languages" (which are usually more about the implicit libraries that come with them than the language itself) and think that you are advancing anything. We don't need any more languages. Stop worrying about how many keystrokes it takes to write a piece of code (that is irrelevant- how long it takes to get a stable,maintainable, shippable product is what matters).
Years ago, I saw a "time line" for programming languages - every 5 years there was a tag that read "death of FORTRAN predicted" - it repeated every 5 years for the entire time line... Some guy jumping on a soapbox and proclaiming himself to be the prophet of programming and delivering "verdicts" on programming languages is just silly.
Stop worrying about whether a language is "trendy". Using a particular tool doesn't make one a good programmer. Writing solid, robust, un-obfuscated code that is well thought out and architected makes one a good programmer. That can be done in any language..
I agree to this.
We have millions of dollars riding on perl scripts. Yeah, we want to move to python, but while we're on perl we're on perl. There's a lot you can do with maintenance and upgrading to better perl with better constructs.
A language is not like a cellphone. We don't toss perl because the new iPhone is out next week. Perl doesn't fade. There's not a battery that will slowly begin not charging as deeply as time goes on. Perl remains perl. The problem domain doesn't radically shift month by month where we need a new language every month. What we have works.
Pascal was/is a much better language than Fortran or Cobol.
I would be shocked if it completely died out.
The one I wonder about is Java. It has sort of replaced Cobol as the language that you use to write programs that no one ever sees but will it keep that place now that Oracle bought it. I know that it is the language of choice for Android and that IBM and other people have their own JVMs but will Oracles lawyers kill it.
I'm not sure that you know FORTRAN or COBOL very well or you wouldn't be comparing them to Pascal.
Pascal and, it's less popular cousin, Modula-2, were meant to be general purpose programming languages.
FORTRAN is primarily a programming language mean for engineers and scientists because of built-in high precision mathematics. It's still quite popular in both fields.
COBOL was designed to be a business language that accountants and business people could use to write reports, etc. Java did not replace COBOL, nor was it meant to. COBOL has largely been replaced by SQL.
The point is that it would be difficult to argue that Pascal is a "better" language than FORTRAN or COBOL. Both FORTRAN and COBOL have unique features which allows them to be better than Pascal for certain functions. It's also why Pascal, which can be replaced with C, etc., will die out long before either COBOL or FORTRAN.
Pascal was/is a much better language than Fortran or Cobol.
I would be shocked if it completely died out.
Me too. Especially since I've been contributing for 17 years to the Free Pascal Compiler, and it supports more platforms than ever. I also don't see any particular declines in our download statistics or the bug reporting rate. Whether Borland-Inprise-CodeGear-Embarcadero Delphi will survive, that's another question. If they'd disappear, that would however be unfortunate for us too though, since many of our users use both products (Delphi for its polish and commercial support, ours for the multi-platform support).
Donate free food here
LISP
LOGO
PASCAL
BASIC
PL/1
And maybe that's it. Most other languages are still in use by various organizations and developers.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
In the end we'll all get Back-to-Basics with BASIC so it may be the last programming language standing, much to the chagrin of so many snobs. :)
Just because his market niche is out of fashion doesn't mean is dead... paxcompiler, oxygene, lazarus/freepascal, delphi : all, are still well maintained and growing in use, maybe are tools very tuned for said niche markets ( even morfik is still popular in brasil )
The right tool for each job depends on whom is doing the work. For windows programming, i am still more productive coding to PowerBasic than PellesC ( offering both only the platform sdk mostly ) and while VisualC saves me some time, also tends to add library dependencies... so not the best option in all the cases
Delphi is a dialect of PASCAL, still around.
You're not into CADD are you, LISP is programming language for AutoCAD and also included as one of programming languages in Bricscad and IntelliCAD to be able to run code made for AutoCAD . Yes, I'm former AutoLISP developer.
.
The purpose of the article is not to convey any manner of knowledge on the subject.
It's chewing gum for the job seeker, no more, no less.
There are easier criteria to judge whether a language is going out of style.
Vulnerable: It isn't used for everything.
Definitely Endangered: It isn't taught in schools or trained by businesses.
Severely Endangered: The only people who know the language are consultants and retirees (the two groups are not mutually exclusive).
Critically Endangered: The language only survives as unsupported code on legacy systems deemed too costly to replace.
Perl will be alive and well long after this guy and his predictions are in the grave.
Apple Pilot is dead. It's so dead that a Google search for "apple pilot" brings up nothing related.
Google for "apple pilot language" and the first hit is an Apple II history page.
It deserved to die, but it's not just dead, it's erased from the internet, but not completely
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It would be incorrect to say Perl is dying because Perl6 has not delivered on its original goal of being a worthy successor to Perl5. Although Perl6 was originally slated as that replacement, the two languages (Perl5 and Perl6) have drifted significantly and there is no syntax compatibly between them (although there are some projects around who goal is to make it easier for Perl6 programers to load and use Perl5 libraries, and vice versus). As a result the Perl community no longer sees Perl6 as the replacement for Perl5. Now there are two separate development teams and the Perl5 team has recently release an update to version 20, and work on version 22 is in the works. The Perl6 team continues to work on Perl6 but many people in the Perl community see it more as a hobby and as a lab rather than as a language one would expect to use on the job. Nevertheless lots of ideas have emerged from the Perl6 'lab' and has influenced the more iterative development of Perl5.
Peace, or Not?
Why is support for Polish in particular so important? Are most Pascal programmers in Poland?
Still pissed off about the fact that there is not one single language for programming. Someone has to make an interface that seamlessly translates anything to C++ bidirectionally on the fly.
Or, even better, an AI that translates binary to C++ organizing it in a human readable correct structure. With procedurally generated comments based on cyclomatic complexity. For example:
"DEV1: Yeah, the next part is a big fuck-up. I'm sorry."
"DEV2: Dear DEV1, after two days correcting your shit I swear I'd give my car for the chance to meet you in a dark alley."
I was programming in Ada last month, so this one will not die too...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Nobody mentioned Forth. It must be dead. Half-joking here. The first user that leaps to mind is NASA. IIRC, they're known to have written some very robust Forth for probes. It's been a long time since I've looked at the early boot process of a BSD or Linux distro. Is it still there? The reason I think Forth might die is because I come across people who think something with a gig of RAM is a "tiny embedded system". With that kind of power you don't need Forth.
A few people are playing with other languages like Joy, which also use RPN. These are academic "esolangs" though. Can they ever be said to have been alive?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Yeah Larry has long said that Perl6 is the development playground. Things are tried out in 6 and what works well get applied to Perl 5.x. We may never have a Perl release called 6.x, and we don't need one. In some ways, it's like Fedora and Red Hat - try things out in the development branch and put the best stuff in the stable branch.
Complaining that Perl6 isn't stable "yet" is like complaining that Fedora isn't stable "yet" - it's not supposed to be stable.
Bliss16 Bliss32 Spitbol PDP (DEC) command line. Adventure metalanguange.
I agree completely; what a wonky, flimsy thing JavaScript is, but it seems it's got a fast VM and now it's going to rule us all...
How much code is written in the language that satisfies these criteria:
- Mission critical.
- Impossible to port.
- Impossible to replace.
- Impossible to redo.
- Works as intended with no/minimal maintenance.
(note: "impossible" also includes "costs enough to sink the company if we tried")
More then 3 on "yes"? It's going to stay. Less than 2? Probably not so.
In other words, Cobol is still here because it satisfies ALL of these requirements. Ruby isn't because the only companies where anything done in Ruby was mission critical are dot.coms that folded before 2005. And those that didn't, porting/replacing/redoing Ruby code is far from impossible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"COBOL has largely been replaced by SQL."
SQL is not even an actual Turing-complete programming language! You don'y know WTF you are talking about.
2006 ACM Programming Contest Poland 2nd and 7th in field of 12 http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
FROM THE RESULTS POSTED ON THE FRONT PAGE, FINAL SCORES/PLACEMENTS:
1. Saratov State University (Russia) - 6 problems
2. Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) - 6 problems
3. Altai State Technical University (Russia) - 5 problems
4. University of Twente (Netherlands) - 5 problems
5. Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China) - 5 problems
6. St. Petersburg State University (Russia) - 5 problems
7. Warsaw University (Poland) - 5 problems
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) - 5 problems
9. Moscow State University (Russia) - 5 problems
10. Ufa State Technical University (Russia) - 5 problems
11. University of Alberta (Canada) - 4 problems
12. University of Waterloo (Canada) - 4 problems
*AND*
Iirc, it was even BETTER for them in 2005 in the same contest.
2007 too -> Polish Students won ACM Programming Contest http://pbarut.blogspot.com/200... + Polish students prove best programmers in the world http://www.naukawpolsce.pap.pl...
Recently (2012) same deal "Russian, Polish Universities Take Top Spots in ACM ICPC Programming Contest" http://www.acm.org/press-room/...
TOTAL STATS FOR THAT PROGRAMMING CONTEST ARE HERE -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
APK
P.S.=> Yes, "I have a dog in this hunt" (I'm polish by descent, but 1st generation U.S. Citizen) & regarding Object-Pascal itself, I most *definitely* do (for great technical reasons shown here (yes, "shameless plug") http://developers.slashdot.org...
... apk
From the selling figure the C=64 was quite common back in the 80ies, But I guess they are rare by now ...
On the other hand wasn't that an operting system? Hmm,
Why's the post I just replied to get a -1 for when it's shown facts?
Lisp keeps being reinvented, often poorly.
rho rho rho of X
always equals one
rho is dimension
rho rho rank
APL is fun!
Back in the day (some decades ago), I got lots of what would nowadays be called "geek cred" by shaving a line off an APL system function, while fully preserving its function. Ah, for the IBM System/360, with a whole quarter megaword of core memory.
VB.Net has some nice features over C sharp. 1) type name is to the right of the variable name in declarations, which is how it should be for modern type names. 2) No semi-colons, nuf sed. 3) End-X block enders are better self-documentation and reduce loop and IF mix ups after fat fingering.
Table-ized A.I.
FFS -- what a crock of shit. I personally don't recommend Ruby to clients any more in favor of NodeJS, but there's still plenty of startups going with Ruby. A hell of a lot more than Perl. But with that said, if it were up to me I'd happily see Perl and PHP die. While Perl is definitely a dying language, PHP seems to be holding on -- with nasty frameworks like Yii (which feature views where anything goes) gaining popularity.
Has anyone seriously used this for anything other than writing Windows shareware in the 1990s?
I really have no problems with the language, even used it in the 1990s, actually pretty decent. But what an idiotic company behind it. Basically Borland's company strategy was: "Lets go muzzle to muzzle against Microsoft with our closed source language that only runs on Microsoft Windows, and lets charge a lot of money for our language thats completely incompatible with, but sort of resembles Microsoft C# when Microsoft lets you have Visual Studio for free".
If they would have open sourced so it could be cross platform, it or had some way of using your existing C++ code they might have had a chance. But yet again, a half way decent environment ruined by a completely idiotic company.
* yes, evidently the new version is "cross platform", but it a joke. The thing only runs on Windows which generates a binary that looks like it has some sort of emulation environment in it, then copy and hope that it runs on a Mac. And, they don't even remotely resemble Mac apps, looks similar to an Gnome/Qt app running on Linux with an OSX theme.
Exactly. I did a stint at an energy company and they have large *cough* Solaris server farms they use for all manner of data processing, and I helped them build a set of tools with SAS and Perl 5 to accomplish what they needed. I would have used Python but they had more people familiar with Perl than Python. It's not going anywhere in the short term.
APL ? //now get off my lawn
Rexx?
After I totalled him/her today with his/her own words http://slashdot.org/comments.p... after this erroneous statement of his/hers:
"I tore apart your stupid hosts file crapola." - by BarbaraHudson (3785311) on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @10:46AM (#47703255) Homepage
Well, see that 1st link above then... lol, as well as all the times "shim"'s done a "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. this list of facts I've asked Barb to disprove -> http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* Yes - I know: "Why the him/her - his/her?" Right?
Couple reasons actually:
---
1.) She's KNOWN to have multiple sockpuppet accounts active @ the SAME time to for cheating moderation http://slashdot.org/~BarbaraHu... = http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson... = http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2... to upmod him/herself (for largely bullshit material most times, no less) & to downmod those he/she CAN'T get the better of via facts (just downmods to effetely *try* to "hide" those posts).
&
2.) He/She LITERALLY is a "shim" (transsexual)
---
(One messed up human being, in other words... one whose been stalking/harassing me by AC posts & bogus downmods since, oh... 2010 or so!)
APK
P.S.=> Hard to believe? I thought so too (started when I caught "Barb/Tom" screwing up on AutoRun in Windows & he/she evidently couldn't handle it (too much estrogen doses on a male brain maybe?)), & literally started a campaign with others to harass me by ac etc., quoted here:
"HOWTO: trolling the hosts file guy in one easy step The next time you see a post by him, just reply anonymously. And to really mess with his head, reply anonymously to your anonymous post, disagreeing with your first anon post (extra points if you claim in the second post that you're him - that REALLY sets him off)." - by tomhudson (43916) barbara.hudson@ ... a - h u dson.com on Saturday April 16, 2011 @01:38PM (#35841122) Journal
FROM http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Will wonders NEVER cease - psycho loons are everywhere, especially online... apk
The primordial ooze of sed and awk from which sprang forth Perl whose ugliness and intractability spawned Python and Ruby. LISP whose offsring are a multitude; Scheme, Close, Scala, R, S+ and more. COBOL, assembly, and Fortran whose bastard offspring was BASIC, the black pit of which sprang forth VB, VB script and a host of shambling imitators. C which gave forth C++ and Objective C. Pascal which brought into the world Delphi and UCSD PASCAL. UCSD Pascal which when grafted with C and C++ gave us Java and C#.
They were fruitful though and so will never truly die.....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
There is no useful or objective information anywhere in the article it is all childish name calling and appealing to what the cool kids are doing.
TFA is what I hate about this industry too many people have their heads in what's cool and getting suckered by marketeers rather than thinking about what they are doing and investing necessary effort to research and arrive based on objective criteria the best tool to get the job done.
Complete with unsupported (unsupportable?) assertions ("perl is dead! DEAD!") on completely wrong-headed propositions ("A programming language can die," which apparently means that "the cool kids don't want to get their precious genius minds dirty with it because it's too mainstream.")
And yet here I am, participating in the conspiracy by commenting. I hate what Slashdot has made me become. I should have walked away months, maybe years, ago.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
There is actually one language that I can think of used to be popular and significant that is actually now dead: PL/M
CP/M was written in PL/M (the OS that MS-DOS is based on.) Later versions of CP/M had most of the code rewritten in assembly for speed reasons. When Microsoft converted it from the 8080 to the 8086 for PCs after version 1.0 one of the things they focused on was replacing the remaining PL/M code with C code. It didn't take much time before MS-DOS was completely free of PL/M code.
Fast forward to today and there isn't a single modern PL/M compiler out there. Pretty incredible really considering that today all it takes is 1 guy deciding to spend about 6 months writing a LLVM frontend. The last one was PL/M-386, which dates to the 80's, everything newer than that focuses on converting PL/M code to C code. I would be surprised to hear about a single new software project being started today in PL/M, and I expect that the number of programmers actively writing PL/M code is a 2 digit number.
Amazing when you think about it that a language used to implement an OS which the world's most popular OS is descended from is dead now.
The order is roughly reversed, the bottom two are already dead. And we can only hope that the third from the bottom would die but it won't.
No real justification is made, save for a couple of code examples for each language that the author finds somehow absurd. Oh, and he marched out the Twitter argument for Ruby. Yes, it's true: not every language is suitable for every purpose! No, Ruby was not appropriate to use for EVERYTHING to bring Twitter to scale.
While putting .net on the list won't make it die, I wish the author would put Java on the list. It won't die either, but we can hope.
A sample of the writing in the article:
"Perl, which works as a CGI scripting language, found its most popular use in generating Web pages."
Clueless drivel.
I was a CS major in the late 70s too. We learned to program at least a smattering of Norwegian University Algol on our Univac 1106, as well as SNOBOL (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language), APL and something called XL6 (a 'list processing language' so obscure it's not even in the wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure I got the name right.) In other classes I learned some specialty languages, Dynamo (Dynamic Models) and GPSS (General Purpose Simulation System).
Whatever happened to Algol anyway?
As I recall, SNOBOL was actually pretty cool, sort of like Pearl in that you could learn to do some useful things very quickly in it. I don't know that the code was all that readable even to the coder after 3 weeks though, since I never had to look at my code 3 weeks later. And I think even the professor who taught it complained about some of the choices for characters to use as operators. Still, I have this lingering feeling that somehow SNOBOL was a language that was unfairly passed over, maybe because of the comical name.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The original IBM PC's and the early clones had basic in rom as well. That really didn't change until around the 286/386 time.
Written in Delphi XE2 Object Pascal, My FREE hosts program adds speed, security, reliability, & more, by doing more, more efficiently vs. addons + fixes DNS' issues:
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit:
http://start64.com/index.php?o...
---
A.) Hosts do more than:
1.) AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/... )
2.) Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
3.) Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
B.) Hosts add reliability vs. downed/redirected dns (& overcome site redirects e.g. /. beta).
C.) Hosts secure vs. malicious domains too -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... w/ less "moving parts" complexity
D.) Hosts files yield more:
1.) Speed (adblock & hardcodes fav sites - faster than remote dns)
2.) Security (vs. malicious domains serving malcontent + block spam/phish & trackers)
3.) Reliability (vs. downed or Kaminsky redirect vulnerable dns, 99% = unpatched vs. it & worst @ isp level + weak vs DGA, & Fastflux + dynDNS botnets)
4.) Anonymity (vs. dns request logs + dnsbl's).
---
* Hosts do more w/ less (1 file) @ faster levels (ring 0) vs redundant inefficient addons (slowing slower ring 3 browsers) via filtering 4 the IP stack (coded in C, loads w/ os, & 1st net resolver queried w\ 45++ yrs.of optimization).
* Addons = more complex + slow browsers in messagepassing (use a few concurrently & see) & are nullified by native browser methods - It's how Clarityray's destroying Adblock.
* Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption + excessive cpu use too (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...)
Instead, work w/ a native kernelmode part - hosts (An integrated part of the ip stack)
APK
P.S.=> "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend"
...apk
Can adblock do these 15 things hosts files can for more speed, security, reliability, & more:
1.) Secure you vs. known malicious sites/servers (beyond malicious adbanners - see 2 thru 6 below next)
2.) Secure you vs. downed DNS servers aiding reliability
3.) Secure you vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns servers
4.) Protect you vs. fastflux using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
5.) Protect you vs. dynamic dns using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
6.) Protect you vs. domain generation algorithm using botnet attacks and stop their communications back to their C&C servers
7.) Speed you up for websurfing not only by adblocking but also hardcoding favorite sites
8.) Get you past a dnsbl you may not agree with
9.) Keep you off dns request logs
10.) Do all of those things and block ads (better than adblock) more efficiently in cpu cycles and memory usage
11.) Work on ANY webbound application (think stand-alone email programs, for example).
12.) Give you direct, easily notepad/texteditor controlled data for all of the above
13.) Block out trackers
14.) Block spam mails sources
15.) Block phishing mails sources
"?"
* Simple YES or NO answers will do for repliers to this - that's all.
APK
P.S.=> The ANSWER ="NO" to each enumerated item above as far as "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" (crippled by default & 'souled-out' defeating it's very base purpose) is concerned -> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/...
So, *IF* you feel like doing things LESS efficiently as well -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... ontop of doing less than hosts do (by far) with more complexity + from a slower mode of operations (usermode with more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode, also starting up w/ the IP stack itself, before REDUNDANT inefficient addons even BEGIN to operate, & as the 1st resolver queried by the OS as well)?
That'd be illogical: I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make them drink!
... apk
Shouldn't the measure be the availability of compilers ?
W. Palant wrote me by email 1st saying "hosts are a shitty solution" to which I replied:
"Show us adblock can do more for added speed, security, reliability, & anonymity than hosts can, + that adblock does it more efficiently than hosts"
Which on my latter 'point-in-challenge' on efficiency AdBlock's proven by research to be MASSIVELY inefficient -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... & adblock does FAR less than hosts (especially crippled by default).
I sent Wladimir Palant that challenge in response to his statement from 2 different email addresses I use!
Result = Still no answer from him in regard to my challenge put to him to this very day MONTHS later - that tell you anything? It did me!
He knows his addon is less efficient & features laden by FAR vs. hosts - Wladimir Palant RAN like a scared rabbit!
ClarityRay's also DESTROYING AdBlock - via native browser methods to DUMP what addons you use (it can't DO THAT to hosts files).
I only tell it how it is on hosts' superiority vs. AdBlock - Funny part is, Wladimir Palant running does too!
Especially considering "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" has 'souled-out' -> Google And Others Reportedly Pay Adblock Plus To Show You Ads Anyway: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> Bottom-Line: Hosts = a superior solution that also fixes DNS redirect security issues (vs. browser addons & their inefficiencies + messagepassing overheads as well as myriad lack of abilities hosts have from 1 file that's part of the IP stack itself - faster, more efficient, & less redundant as well, since TCP/IP has 45++ yrs. of refinement & optimization in it, & runs in a higher CPU serviced ring of privelege & operations in kernelmode vs. slower usermode layering over browsers slowing them more, & hosts = 1st resolver queried by the OS itself also)... apk
In 1983, Cybol was a compiled language for 6800 microprocessor that combined the very worst of an unprotected-memory-model OS and a flaky compiler. If you used an undeclared variable in your Cybol program, the compiler would declare it for you, assume is was an integer (regardless of usage), and allocate two bytes in PROGRAM CODE space to hold it. When you later copied a 30-byte string into it, if over-wrote 28 bytes of your code space with data. And that's when things got worse...
The OS, allowing such behavior, would lose control when execution occurred at the contaminated memory location, and when it crashed, it would activate the write heads on the diskette drives. That, in turn, would usually result in a diskette that required re-formatting to be usable again. If that was the disk with your code on it... too bad - your fault (or so the designer said).
I don't put Cybol on my resume any more, since no one has asked me about it since 1984. But if you've got an LC-3 microcomputer kicking around, and lots of disks, give me a call. I'm rusty, but my right arm can still yank a disk out of a disk drive faster than most humans living today.
It's a bit of Mozart and Bach, it's a bit of Mach, really. And this one goes to 11.
What language is as good as Perl for throwaway scripts ?
If written countless perl scripts for countless problems such as extracting data from web pages, crude monte-carlo simulations, code generation, merging contact lists, etc... Most of this code is no more, in fact, a lot of it was one-liners directly written on the command line.
For this, I don't need a language that is clean, maintainable and readable. I need a language that is featureful, terse and lenient, and it's exactly what Perl is. As an added bonus it is installed by default in most UNIX systems.
Ah, and BTW, it is a legitimate question.
A lot of modern languages focus on maintainable code, which is a good thing. However, there are some cases where short term efficiency is more important. I thought about ruby (second in the list of dying lanquages...) but are there more recent alternatives ?
I've read my fair share of shit posted on /. over the years (including my own comments!), but this "article" has to rank up near the top.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft said very recently that VB.net wasn't dead.
Java is going nowhere. In addition to being in most phones (Android, Jave ME), it is in every Blu-Ray player (BD-J), every cable box (OCAP), cash registers, ATMs and voting machines. And that isn't even touching on enterprise, web and desktop applications.
Take a look at most language rankings and Java remains near or at the top, whether you look at Tiobe, PyPL, RedMonk, IEEE Spectrum, or the various job surveys published by the likes of Dice.com and eWeek.
Has RPG been mentioned? Or languages such as BLISS ? BCPL ? WATFOR? SPITBOL? SAIL ?
uh ... forth ?
BSD is dying!
Perl doesn't fade
That's partly due to the witch-craft and dark incantations inherent in the language.
:)
I love Perl
Until netcraft confirms it! That's the slashdot way!
You can use CoffeeScript which produces well-formed JavaScript while allowing the programmer to focus on higher-level representation.
I dodn't have an exhaustive list. Moose is one example http://act.yapc.eu/ye2013/talk...
Some 33 years ago, when the firsts computer magazines appeared and most articles were written by computer-science academics, who preached that Pascal was the only worthwhile language, I wrote an article of Fortran that the magazine (Practical Computing) re-titled "The language that refuses to die"
The most memorable of the critcisms in the letters column was "if it wasn't that it produced smaller programs that ran faster, no one would use Fortran"
It seems that, 33 years later, Fortran is still hanging in there, unlike Pascal
> or most early PCs and home computers came from Microsoft.
I would not agree. BASIC existed, but most MS users did not utiltize it until qbasic provided a saner interface.
When the Apple II, PET 2001 and TRS-80 were all released in 1977, all three had BASIC as their primary programming language and operating environment. Upon boot, a BASIC interpreter in immediate mode was presented, not the command line interface used later.
This is where BASIC took off.
After moving from my Commodore VIC-20 (6502 CPU) and Commodore BASIC and Assembly Language to my Commodore PC-II (8088 CPU) the first programming language I used was GWBASIC followed by Assembly Language and then various other programming languages including Microsoft FORTRAN, Borland Prolog, Borland Pascal, Microsoft C, Borland C, Modula-2, MicroFocus COBOL, etc.
You could not possibly be more wrong. Python has support for more code block delimiters than any other programming language. It's true.
Here's the proof: https://www.python.org/doc/humor/#python-block-delimited-notation-parsing-explained
A language dies when there are no longer programmers who are able to code in it. The langauge literally dies as people retire and die off. Well documented languages that are simple to learn will never die. COBAL is dying as a useful language as new programmers stop learning it and people retire.
Companies are still hiring junior COBOL programmers but naturally only India teaches COBOL so only Indians are hired. COBOL can be learned by any competent pre-webframework programmer. However, companies refuse to hire seasoned programmers because suckling on India's teat must be sweeter (more profitable).
Surprisingly, we're actually seeing a rise in COBOL projects at work and a lot of older devs that were re-trained are being gradually pushed back into it. Most of the work is maintenance programming (bit of porting also from mainframe to windows via older CA and NetCOBOL compilers which support the dialect) and a fair bit of that is to add significant functionality, but there has been a bit of a subsequent few new projects using it. This is a division with about 60 devs allocated to this split over close to 25 projects.
COBOL won't die? .. maybe not. Love it, hate it.. it motors along in spite of us.
Startups? 90+% of them are going to fail big time. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
I like VB and VB.NET. When I see a coder willingly using it over another option, I instantly know they are an inept tool. Without it, I would have to speak with them possibly for several minutes in order to make this determination.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Perl and Ruby and VBA (to name a few from the article) are dead and dying?
Author has their head up their arse.
Perl isn't going away anywhere close to soon. Citing perl 6's long development cycle is hardly proof.
Ruby is being used by more and more devop style projects. Puppet and Chef are hardly small time in that sphere.
VBA will continue to be used in corporate environments.
Like Brainfuck?
This is why tabs and only tabs are the proper line indentation character. One tab = indent one level. Two tabs = indent two levels. Tab is the only line indent char. It's a semantic definition. No more confusion.
Not a problem. Everyone defines how much space to render for a tab in their own editor. Everyone wins.
Misbehaving tools are bad. You correctly locked him out until he fixed it. Problem solved.
Tab = indent. Space = ignore. Problem solved.
Beginning of line = tab = indent. Elsewhere = space = ignore. Problem solved.
That man was an idiot. Run python -t. Tabs and spaces should never be mixed. Tab is the only proper, semantic line indent char. Problem solved.
I have several issues with whitespace defining block structure, but the ones you identified are trivial to fix. The real issues are:
The second is properly addressed by better editing tools. The first is annoying, but not enough to outweigh the benefits in clarity and expressiveness from using python. It's really quite easy to adjust.
Yes, and each of those ran a BASIC which was directly derived from Microsoft BASIC, which was originally called Altair BASIC. Moron.
Let's tidy up that perl code from the article:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
print "Content-type: text/plain\xD\xA\xD\xA";
print "Goodbye, World!";
Newlines. They've been a blight on programming for time immemorial. The network end of line calls for carriage return character (ASCII hex 0D) followed by a line feed character (hex 0A). The CGI protocol requires at least the content-type. The request header ends with the first empty line.
In a just and loving world, "\r\n" should work for you. Until you start porting code to old macs or win32 and do you don't use binary mode to write...Look, there is a reason we get paid to program.
I have been programming with Perl for 17 years and continue to get paid to do so. The backend languages for modern network apps just doesn't matter like it used to.
As far as I can tell, programming has been in a bad holding pattern for about 10-12 years. Node.js is a little interesting, but still so young. Java has taken an interesting turn toward functional programming. Python struggles to bury 2.x, but I understand (I use Perl). Ruby has had its time in the sun.
The game is on mobile these days. That means you code in whatever the device will accept. I lament the reduction of choice on that platform, but it's the new normal.
Seriously, PHP is a zombie. Kill it. Kill it with fire already.
Sounds like you did! See my subject-line above & also seems like you liked it, so if you're looking for a "date"?
Wrong door here man, rotflmao...
Me? I don't DO those kinds of things (sounds like you do though, lol - it's not for me so, to each his own (rotflmao))...
APK
P.S.=> Sorry to disappoint anyone as there ARE some *** "StRaNgE-BiRdS" *** around this place... apk
will die with its geezer developers. There are no new Perl developers.
HEY! LISP is still cool, all of my friends on irc say so.
Scala seems to be kicking Clojure to the curb.
C is at the forefront of computer languages you actually really need. There are like 3 hobby operating systems that are coded with plain assembly, but the rest of the lower level stuff is C. As soon as your fancy Rubys and Python can actually be used to write drivers and operating systems I'll consider them proper programming languages, before that I just lump them with HTML and Logo.
Wrong. He was *in* your team, but not *of* your team.
2) Ruby:
You are joking, right?
a) Ruby has equivalent or similar syntax as C (while, for)
b) Ruby has easier or/and safer things like method "each" instead of iterating using for loop in C
c) In lots of cases you don't have to worry about pointers (bad index, pointer point to wrong memory, overriding memory)
d) You don't have to write types "int foo = 42" (Ruby: foo = 42)
People still learns languages like C++, Java and Scala which are more complex than Ruby. So, I don't think it's the case for "C people".
For "C people" language like Haskell/ML/J/Erlang/Factor* may be hard to learn. Functional paradigm is something VERY different than what C use.
Languages like Ruby or Python are easier to learn because C programmer know about lots of stuffs already but he/she does not have to use it in that language.
* Basic Factor programs are easy if you know a stack. The same goes for most of concatenative, stack-based languages.
Which is why COBOL won't die. It does what it is designed to do really really well. That and the cost to "just rewrite it in java" is too high. When people tell me "just rewrite it in java" I just shake my head and walk away. They are the type of people who think a seventy page website is a "big" project. I worked at a company where just printing the working storage section took a ream of paper, double sided. Granted whoever let the program grow so big should have been dragged into the street and beaten to death with the printer, but there are BILLIONS of lines of COBOL code out their, doing your taxes, house mortgages, credit card interest, etc. etc. Boring fvcken language though, glad I only did 4 years of it before getting out.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Whatever happened to Algol anyway?
By 1980, it had turned into Pascal, never to return. Wirth's compiler was a big reason - it was easy to port to new machines, so spread like a virus.
Have you read my blog lately?
Wasn't that ...
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, with strange aeons even death may die."
???
Delphi rulez 4ever !!! :-)
For example, take awk. Please...
Yes languages will be around for ever
2 for the next thousand years
English
Java
...that APL wasn't on the list. I'd hate to have to buy a new keyboard.
Can you imagine the enormous amount of porn content that would have to be transcoded? Seriously, it's not Apple that drives the Internet.
Perl I can understand, but Ruby? No way!
Forth is a threaded interpreted dictionary language that might on the surface seem dead until you realize it's usefulness in machine control, both for servos and stepper motors. As long as there are robots there will be Forth.
ALGOL gave birth to a large number of other languages, such as Pascal and C, with features seeping into FORTRAN. It appears to have died out more because of how things are named. Common Lisp and Scheme are recognizably descendents of McCarthy's Lisp 1.5, but have a lot of differences, arguably more than Pascal and C have with ALGOL. The latest Fortran is a recognizable FORTRAN IV descentant, but has a lot of changes. However, Fortran is still considered FORTRAN, Common Lisp and Scheme are still considered Lisp, while no current language is considered Algol.
As far as SNOBOL, it was incredible at some things, but the control structures really, really sucked. I found it far too frustrating that way to write anything significant in it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
... Pascal and, it's less popular cousin, Modula-2, were meant to be general purpose programming languages. ...
Modula-2 was what Pascal should have been.
But then the new versions of Pascal incorporated the new ideas.
And then many other languages incorporated them.
And Modula-2 was not so far ahead any more...
The need to maintain applications that cost millions to develop is a powerful driver for keeping languages alive. The banking industry (and others) invested HUGE amounts of money in applications based on COBOL. Those applications still do the job, every day. Occasionally they need to be enhanced or extended....and it's cheaper to do that than start from scratch with something else. The languages that will die are those that never resulted in applications that can't be easily / cheaply replaced by something else.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Wow, if the person that wrote the article knew what they were talking about they'd know it wasn't Ruby that was the problem. It was the fact that Ruby should never have been chosen to build a messaging engine that needed serious parallel scale and power that it didn't have at the time. It was a case of using the wrong tool for the job. I believe the one that made that choice is to blame and not the language.
What about the really obnoxious APL? (Who names something "a programming language"...) I used it off and on at university in 1974-1976 for programming statistical analyses. I was happy to move on to stat analysis packages such as BMDP and SAS.
In short you can expect most languages younger than 30 years to disappear soon.
If a language doesn't have it's special reason to exist, it won't.
In case of COBOL and FORTRAN that was a huge amount of business critical code, as well as the possibility to simply run it on your next computer. C is seen as a "smart assembler". LISP and its family are great for logical processing. Java seems to become the new COBOL.
And there are 2 languages on the List which do have those special reasons. One is Perl, which is just a great tool for dealing with strings in a quick and dirty way, the other one is "Object Pascal" which, in it's original form with Delphi is dead, but lives in in FOSS projects like FreePascal and Lazarus, it has the great opportunity of having native code plus platform independent native GUIs. In short their way of doing GUI means that you can write a program on Linux, compile it on a Mac and it'll look and feel like a Mac program.
What will die soonish is of course the .net world as it completely depends on a single company... which doesn't use it for their important products.
There is a project to bring Multics back (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dps8m/). The emulator is making pretty good progress these days getting over 60m instructions into the boot process before crashing. If the emulator succeeds, and I have no reason to doubt this, then anyone wishing to run Multics under the emulator will need to know PL/1 to read the OS code as Multics is mostly written in PL/1 and ALM.
Last I knew, Multics supported all the above languages except Pascal and I could be wrong about that ;)
I can't comment on 1-4 but #5 is completely ridiculous. I get new versions of Delphi twice a year, and each one innovates as well as fixes bugs. Not only that, but patches come out between versions too. I don't see C# with such a rigorous release schedule! If "somebody" get's #5 so wrong I really can't be expected to believe 1-4 either.
Flash and Air can kiss my ass. I agre with Jobs that Flash is just pure aholery. I truly do not get JavaScript taking off. It's the antihero of languages. Python is it's sidekick. and Rub+Rails is like Que: makes great random ass doodads.
At least they aren't pushing to make it an official language of the EU like some people I could mention. Yes, Ireland, I did look at you.
Because if there's anything better than translating from 25 languages into 24 other languages it's translating from 26 into 25.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Java for the betterment of mankind should be added to this list as well.
My company is wedded at the hip to a test automation system built in Perl that dates back to the early 2000s. I grumbled a bit about continuing to use this system after a review two years ago, but it isn't really that bad, and it pays me six figures a year. Perhaps, like COBOL, the rarer it gets, the more valuable the skills will be?
I'll probably get around to learning Python or Java one of these days. :)
- Necron69
i'd rather just click on an icon!
i'm surprised the author never mentioned cobol, fortran, ada, haskell etc? also there are no numbers to back his claim that users are dwindling away...