Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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.
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
It is a pretty ridiculous statement, considering that the BASICs for most early PCs and home computers came from Microsoft.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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).
Umm.. try 1975, when Harvard dropout Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, the first microcomputer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC/
This page accidentally left blank
You can easily do automatic memory management in C++ using reference counted smart pointers. This allows you to control when "memory management" occurs when necessary, as is common in the case of high-performance applications (games, imaging software, etc) where C++ excels. The ability to overload operators allows you to write vastly more readable (and efficient) code than with Objective C. And in Objective C all method dispatches are effectively virtual, where in C++ you can control when you pay the cost.
Objective C is definitely NOT well-suited to solve all the same problems as C++. It's fine that you don't need to write high-performance (or portable) applications, but sweeping generalizations like this just show your ignorance.
Disclaimer: I use C++, Objective C, and Python on a daily basis.
Python can actually be parallelized for certain tasks. And it can be done without even touching the GIL, and without affecting the performance of "regular" code. And it can really perform very, very well.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
IMHO, most supposed "dead" computer languages are in actuality barely even moribund by the above definitions. There are some pseudoextinct languages though. K&R C would probably be a good example.