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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.
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.
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?
That can't be it... There are plenty of young and trendy languages that far outrank Perl and Ruby in the known-shithole category. At least they don't depend on white-spaces to define blocks.
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lol
"Syntax that every programmer uses to make their program readable is unreasonable as a semantically meaningful syntax"
Come on, python's got its problems, but forcing you to lay out your program in a naturally readable way to compile isn't one of them.
For example, duck-typing might be one of the worst ideas in the universe, because it's doing the exact opposite of the whitespace thing. It's decoupling easy-to-make mistakes with the output of compiling of your code.
But this whining about whitespace just comes off as having never actually tried it.
flash isn't a language, its a platform. the language that it uses is actionscript 3, which happens to be a decent language - object oriented, robust, mature, reasonably decent to work with. it has a few quirks, but i haven't met a language that didn't. the flash player is the issue - it's buggy and full of security holes. then, take the fact that Flash Pro allowed amateurs to create content that used machine generated code (which is rarely good), combine it with how ridiculously widespread the flash platform used to be, and you have a recipe for disaster. i happily agree that flash (the platform) needs to go away, but im more than happy to keep using AS3 - as are most developers who have used it. its quite nice on the AIR platform (although you have to know what you're doing to get good performance out of the platform. on the plus side, it weeds out the amateurs pretty quick), and there are some projects in the works for converting AS3 code to C++. there's also HAXE, which is very syntactically similar to AS3 and has excellent performance.
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.
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.
The VB that Office does is VBA, which is essentially VB6. The language that they're predicting will die out is VB.Net, which has a very different syntax.
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.
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).
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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.