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.

Comments

Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70's)

[14erCleaner]

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

Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed...

[i kan reed]

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.

Perl in Latin

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet

[jmac_the_man]

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.

Re:Adoption by large organizations limits extincti

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

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.

Re:Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70

[Halo1]

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).