Goodbye, World? 5 Languages That Might Not Be Long For This World

If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2014-10-09 02:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...

Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2014-10-09 03:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

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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These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by i+kan+reed · 2014-10-09 03:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by geminidomino · 2014-10-09 03:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

If that were the case, PHP would have occupied all 5 slots.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2014-10-09 03:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

I use Python. I have to also work with Python code written by other people.
Autopep8 is your friend and really it shouldn't have to be.

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These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by CastrTroy · 2014-10-09 03:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

Whitespace is great, I use it all the time. I use the IDE to automatically fix the indenting of my code. That doesn't mean the compiler should attach any specific meaning to how things are indented. For one thing, once you let the level of indentation govern the execute, you lose the ability to auto-format your code. You can't autoindent the code based on where the blocks start and end, because the level of indentation defines where the blocks start and end. If you messed up the indentation at some spot, there is little to no indication that something went wrong. It's the same reason I don't like languages that don't require that you define that variables exist. Letting you define variables just by using them leaves you open to spelling mistakes and all the bugs it causes just so you can save a couple lines of code.

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Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2014-10-09 03:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't like languages that don't require that you define that variables exist.
If only Python and Ruby offered something similar to Perl's "use strict".

--
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-09 03:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

It wouldn't be an object-oriented language without duck-typing.
lol no. An object-oriented language is language in which you can easily write object-oriented code. Object-oriented code does not imply dynamic typing.

broken code should break immediately and with regularity, rather than hobble along until specific conditions are met.
Broken code that can break in the compiler should break in the compiler.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by phantomfive · 2014-10-09 04:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

Duck-typing is fundamental to program polymorphism. It wouldn't be an object-oriented language without duck-typing.
Duck typing becomes a problem when your program becomes big and lots of people are working on it, because it removes compile-time checks. Unless everyone on their project is extremely careful to write readable code, then random bugs will start popping up because it's not checked at compile time. Although I'm sure you personally write excellent, readable code so that's not a problem.

Also, come on, duck-typing is not necessary for polymorphism, inheritance and defined interfaces work just as well.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by i+kan+reed · 2014-10-09 04:07 · Score: 2

No, strongly typed languages don't use duck typing. Even some weakly typed languages can still insist on interfaces being fully implemented. Python's duck typing falls apart specifically when the gate conditions don't update (possibly in distant parts of code) to match functional changes.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by bluefoxlucid · 2014-10-09 04:08 · Score: 2

Programs with inheritance have duck-typing. You just define specifically which ducks are still ducks.

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Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by PRMan · 2014-10-09 04:11 · Score: 4, Funny

Oh PROGRAMMING languages! I was in here looking for German.

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Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by 3dr · 2014-10-09 04:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

Python is my go-to language for quick code sketches, framework ideas, etc. That's the power of dynamically typed languages, it's very easy to throw code together to test ideas, and is what I value in "scripting" languages.
As much as I like Python, even with it's quirks like len() is a function on a sequence not a member, the one thing I despise is the whitespace-describes-structure. I have lots hours due to an auto-format of code run amok. Suddenly, all the code following an if-statement is now the body of that statement. It just doesn't make sense to not have block delimeters. With every other meaningful language under the sun using curly braces, why couldn't Python? I like the *idea* of clean code like Python code, and I enjoy reading Python code, but I prefer to have explicit block syntax.
As an aside about spelling mistakes, I agree, and Python doesn't help you there (unless you are reading a misspelled class field). One trick I use to fortify larger Python programs is to define slots on each class to explicitly define the members. If your code accesses a mistyped member name, that name will not be in the __slots__ list and the python runtime will raise an exception. Not only do __slots__ protect you from name typos, they are faster than regular fields for some reason. I've shared this tip with other pythonistas, and nobody else has heard of doing this; I can't believe others aren't doing this, too.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by gstoddart · 2014-10-09 04:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
So, here's my problem with whitespace being syntactically significant ... everybody likes to see code with different levels of indent. There isn't one "naturally readable" way which everybody agrees on. And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".
Years ago I had a co-worker. He liked emacs, and I liked vi. OK, whatever, that's not a big deal, I can overlook that.
The problem was his electric mode in emacs was thinking itself oh-so-clever, and instead of storing the *actual* number of tab indents or whitespace, it just stripped them in favor of a single tab that emacs would then know how to render later.
Unfortunately, not all editors rendered the same way his beloved emacs did. So after he edited a document, every line showed as a diff, and every file he edited now rendered as gibberish in every other editor, because there was only a single whitespace character.
He was one of a team, but wouldn't listen when we said his editor was fscking up the code, and making it impossible for us to work on it.
So, where he wanted to see two character indents, and I wanted to see 8, and a co-worker wanted to see 4 ... once he'd edited it, in anything not using this electric mode didn't work.
Finally the solution was to lock him out of CVS, and tell him in no uncertain terms it was his problem to make his editor work with our coding standards, and that we didn't give a damn about his pretty little electric mode.
It took a lot of howling and gnashing of teeth for him to realize that he needed to fix it.

But this whining about whitespace just comes off as having never actually tried it.
No, it's a concept which had been ridiculed when COBOL used to insist you put things in specific columns. And as far as I'm aware, even COBOL stopped doing it, because we don't use punch cards any more.
For any of us who have taken compiler classes, a context free grammar specifically ignores whitespace. That's how compilers have worked for a very long time, if the grammar productions for your language involve counting whitespace ... well, my compilers prof would have failed me. Instead of having a visible thing to define a block, oh, well, just indent a few more chars.
You can't see what character whitespace actually is ... is that 8 spaces or a tab? Which means when your program suddenly won't compile, or is doing strange things, you have to spend extra effort to figure out WTF specific piece of invisible whitespace is the problem.
I've thought syntactically significant whitespace was dumb since I first saw it. Specifically because it creates many many places where it can go wrong, and no easy way to find them.
I've seen someone debug a python program, and even though things were in the same column in the editor, some were tabs and some were spaces, which had the very bizarre effect of making it semantically different than it looked. Because the block wasn't explicit, it was implicit based purely on indenting.
If you can break a program by changing the tab indent of your editor, the problem lies in the syntax of your language.
Making whitespace affect your syntax means "I'm too damned lazy to make my blocks explicit, so I'll rely on this cheap hack".
I've also worked with blind programmers who used code readers (yes, blind, and they were damned fine programmers). You know what whitespace being part of your syntax does to them? Renders them almost unusable.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by bluefoxlucid · 2014-10-09 04:21 · Score: 2

Yeah, no, that's the cop-out answer. It's like saying you always have to trade something off: you can't make something better at X without making it worse at Y. Cheaper, faster, better, pick two.
Problem: I can make a language that is complete ass shit for anything, completely slow, expensive, terrible. It stands to reason a language may be, overall, better for a wider variety of tasks *and* faster *and* easier to implement, with different corner cases where another language might work better because it was designed for that or has some specific advantage that outweighs all of its disadvantages.
Some languages, for what they're good at, are not the best at that; and, in many cases, you can provide a different way of solving those problems without making a language that's particularly worse at anything than the original, inadequate language. That's called "better". Other languages are terrible for anything, or are just terrible as a model.
PHP for example has many overlapping functions, no standard implementation guidelines (core functions operate differently, take different styles of arguments, and are named differently; it's designed to solve similar problems in completely different ways; etc.), and so cannot be programmed in without either an at-hand reference or a huge volume of memory-by-rote. A language exactly identical to PHP except where every regex function took arguments in the same order and used a flag for lower-case searching would be, definitively, superior to PHP.
Python's most major problem is implementation: the reference implementation can't handle threads and, solving that, you have many extensions which are not thread-safe because they assume Python doesn't handle threads properly. Fixing that would be a beast: you'd have to minimize or eliminate the GIL, and then mandate that all broken extensions can fuck themselves.
C++'s most major problem is massive complexity in object orientation, which is not a problem in Objective-C--which itself is well-suited to solve all the same problems as C++. C++ mangling is also problematic; Objective-C less so. On the other hand, Objective-C is reference counted (superior to C++ manual memory management), while Python and Perl and PHP are implicitly reference counted (or, in some implementations, garbage collected), which is better, and Java and CIL are garbage collected, which can be slow and complex and harmful for performance. Both Python and Objective-C soundly thrash C++.

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Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Wootery · 2014-10-09 04:53 · Score: 2

Not really.
It's not a matter of just 'having inheritance'. Java and C++ have inheritance, but Carpenter#createTable is distinct from CSVReader#createTable (assuming no common ancestor class or interface), as the languages have static binding.
In, Ruby or Objective-C, which have late binding, you can 'pun' the createTable method name/signature: you can pass in a reference to any object which has a method by the name createTable (i.e. it 'looks like a duck and quacks like a duck'). Not so in Java or C++.
To simulate duck-typing in Java, you'd have to create an interface for each method, such as a HasCreateTableMethod interface, to be implemented by each class which has a createTable method (of the appropriate signature).
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by UnknownSoldier · 2014-10-09 05:20 · Score: 2

> Letting you define variables just by using them leaves you open to spelling mistakes and all the bugs it causes just so you can save a couple lines of code.
Indeed. Javascript is a piece of shit without this hack:

"use strict"; // Must declare all variables before using

Didn't we learn anything from BASIC in the 80's??
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Stele · 2014-10-09 05:30 · Score: 3, Informative

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.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by pak9rabid · 2014-10-09 05:33 · Score: 2

As the saying goes, there's two types of languages: the one everyone bitches about, and the one nobody uses.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by tibit · 2014-10-09 05:51 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by bluefoxlucid · 2014-10-09 05:57 · Score: 2

The ability to overload operators allows you to make your code readable to people who took a study in your code base, and not to people who can program in the language you write in. This is why most languages don't allow operator overloading. Operator overloading is commonly cited as one of the worst mistakes made while implementing the C++ programming language.

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Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by ceoyoyo · 2014-10-09 06:01 · Score: 2

So, here's my problem with whitespace being syntactically significant ... everybody likes to see code with different levels of indent. There isn't one "naturally readable" way which everybody agrees on. And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".
Use tabs. Set your tab stop to however many spaces you like. There you go. As a bonus, I can read your code with my preferred level of indent as well.
One of the few things that irritates me about Python is the PEP that suggests you should use spaces for whitespace.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by lgw · 2014-10-09 06:05 · Score: 2

He has a good point though. Python's fundamental flaw is that it allows both tabs and spaces as indentation. If it had picked one, and made the other a syntax error, it could have been a great concept.
Curly braces are meaningless clutter. Indention level is what matters to the human eye, and all that the compiler needs. But you have to freaking normalize indention if you're going to take that path, or it ruins the whole deal.

--
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by ShanghaiBill · 2014-10-09 06:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

If only Python and Ruby offered something similar to Perl's "use strict".
If only programmers always used code they wrote themselves.
I put "use strict" at the top of every perl file, javascript file, etc. I also compile C/C++ with "-Wall -Wextra". But that doesn't protect me from libraries and headers written by incompetent slobs.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Jane+Q.+Public · 2014-10-09 06:53 · Score: 2

TFA is just plain wrong.

Not just about Ruby (which is still among the top 10 popular languages, and shows absolutely no sign of fading), but also about Twitter.

Twitter is a hodgepodge of languages, depending on just what "part" of Twitter you're talking about. For example, search is now done in Java. Some of the back-end is done in Scala. Etc.

Further, when one of the Twitter founders decided to switch part of the system from Rails (which is not the same as "Ruby") to Scala, he did so because he didn't understand how to properly do it in Rails.

Perf tests using the same kind of system in Scala, and Rails done properly, showed virtually identical results. But Twitter had already switched over.

It's no surprise at all that Java works faster in most ways than interpreted languages in general. Big deal. (That's why, by the way, jRuby exists... so you can pre-compile your apps if you want to and get Java speed.)

Ruby is an active, vibrant, and still growing community. It is still one of the most popular language.Not only did TFA get history wrong, it conflates Rails with Ruby, which is like saying Django and PHP are the same things, or that JavaScript and Node.js are the same things. It's all just BS.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Matheus · 2014-10-09 07:04 · Score: 3, Funny

Long Live Lisp!
Parenthesis Parenthesis Everywhere... No white space required ;-)
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by Darinbob · 2014-10-09 07:11 · Score: 2

We did learn from BASIC in the 80s to never touch Visual Basic in the 90s.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by wrook · 2014-10-09 08:08 · Score: 4, Funny

OMG! A rant about Emacs vs VI with a sub-rant about indenting with spaces vs tabs!!! And you even throw in a story about locking someone out of CVS (although in my day we used RCS and we were damn happy to have it).
You know how to make an old man feel young again.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by shutdown+-p+now · 2014-10-09 08:58 · Score: 2

Operator overloading is not different from functions at all - operators are just functions with fancy names. And a programmer can just as well define a function that has "multiply" as a name, but does something else entirely, as he can define operator * that does something else entirely. These two are identical in all aspects. The only reason why operators were historically not redefinable is precedent, and it doesn't have any reasoning behind it.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by gewalker · 2014-10-09 09:29 · Score: 2

Some guy named Guido said
__slots__ is a terrible hack with nasty, hard-to-fathom side
effects that should only be used by programmers at grandmaster and
wizard levels. Unfortunately it has gained an enormous undeserved
popularity amongst the novices and apprentices, who should know
better than to use this magic incantation casually.
Using __slots__ to enforce your programming style is very much not Pythonish. It break pickle an other things too.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... by haruchai · 2014-10-09 11:35 · Score: 3, Funny

Hah! German will never die!!

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five year phase-in plan that would be known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru! And zen world!

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Pain is merely failure leaving the body

Who cares? by PhilHibbs · 2014-10-09 02:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?

Re:Who cares? by jandrese · 2014-10-09 04:07 · Score: 2

Plankalkül. An 80 year old language for a machine that was never successful.

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I read the internet for the articles.

Adoption by large organizations limits extinction by Terry+Pearson · 2014-10-09 03:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Ruby? by Chris+Mattern · 2014-10-09 03:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

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!).

Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet by Beetle+B. · 2014-10-09 03:01 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Beetle B.

Re:Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet by geminidomino · 2014-10-09 03:17 · Score: 3, Informative

VBA != VB.Net
Re:Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet by jmac_the_man · 2014-10-09 03:47 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Ummm, no. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-09 03:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Not MY language! by Bovius · 2014-10-09 03:01 · Score: 2

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? by just_another_sean · 2014-10-09 03:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

Scripting language du jour by Pro923 · 2014-10-09 03:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Re:Scripting language du jour by Pro923 · 2014-10-09 03:31 · Score: 2

I would agree... But in practice, every UI that I've used that isn't built from native code works like total crap. I don't understand why, but it just always seems slow, sluggish, and the components just don't work exactly like their native counterparts (like you'd expect them to function). Also, in reality every implementation is a bit different. Finally, we add an entire additional layer of security holes (all of the problems that I fix these days on my friends computers seem to result from unpatched java or adobe products).
Re:Scripting language du jour by phantomfive · 2014-10-09 04:11 · Score: 2

More importantly, univerities teach Python.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Scripting language du jour by steveha · 2014-10-09 04:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

...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.
Maybe so, but Python is getting more popular and widely-used rather than dying out.
IMHO Python hits the sweet spot: it's powerful and expressive, yet the code is readable and maintainable. The worst thing about Python is that it's pretty slow, but it has a vast library of extensions (written in C or even FORTRAN) and the extensions aren't slow. (Like, if you wrote your own FFT in Python it would be glacially slow, but you don't need to write your own FFT because fast ones are available... and if your program is mostly doing FFTs it will be nearly as fast as a C program, because the slow Python glue code isn't where the program spends most of its time.)
In the world of science, everyone is converging on Python because of SciPy (which rocks). As people get fed up with legacy systems, they adopt Python as the replacement. I attended a keynote lecture at the SciPy conference a few years back, and a senior guy from the Hubble Space Telescope project talked about how they were leaving a language called IDL and switching to Python, and how much happier they were with Python.
I have heard that the Ruby guys had a project to make a "SciRuby" but (a) progress was slow and (b) the science guys are already using SciPy and won't switch unless some really compelling advantage appears.
Python is a clean, well-designed language that can have anything you need put in as an extension. So you can replace Matlab with Python and it's mostly a win. You can replace R with Python (and I think it's probably mostly a win, but I'm biased toward Python and have never seriously used R so feel free to ignore my opinion).
Python can be used by sysadmins, web site developers, cloud app developers, scientific researchers... really almost everyone can do their work in Python, and they can talk to each other about it if they are all using the same language. That's not a trivial benefit.
So, IMHO you would not be "wasting your time" to try actually using Python.

--
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Re:Scripting language du jour by shutdown+-p+now · 2014-10-09 11:05 · Score: 2

It's mostly just you.
With respect to different versions not being backwards compatible, it's more of a branding issue. There are two languages. One is Python 2, the other is Python 3. Within each of those, there's backwards compatibility, but between them, they're not compatible in general (though with some care it's possible to write code that works in both, and with some more care it'll even do the same thing - but you'd best leave that to library writers...). For your own project, pick one and stick to it. For other people's code, you might need both 2 and 3, but you should only need one version of each.

Maybe Perl is just "complete," not dying. by Arakageeta · 2014-10-09 03:05 · Score: 4, Informative

"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.

Re:Maybe Perl is just "complete," not dying. by fahrbot-bot · 2014-10-09 07:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Careful grasshopper. Ya, I'm 51 and have been using Perl since it was invented - along with Emacs. But Perl can be a go-to language for anyone, *even* those still in their 20s. I currently develop software that runs on Solaris/Unix, Linux and Windows using about 10 different programming languages and among all of them, Perl is the most useful (with Java second) for cross-platform things. We also use Python for some things, and it could probably replace Perl for others, but, seriously, why bother.
Newer doesn't always mean better and old doesn't always mean obsolete.

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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .

Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70's) by 14erCleaner · 2014-10-09 03:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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COBOL - (Perl,Ruby)? by MiniMike · 2014-10-09 03:09 · Score: 2

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.

Re:COBOL - (Perl,Ruby)? by plopez · 2014-10-09 05:41 · Score: 2

Nah, not Fortran. It is still widely used. Often linked into R or Mathematica applications. And Fortran 2008 is OO and natively supports parallel processing. When time and huge data sets need to be crunched it is the best tool for the job.Can Java or C# do all that? Data analytics anyone? Geological modeling anyone? Fluid modeling, perhaps used for wind turbines? Or maybe weather modeling?
All good problem domains for a fast lean language.

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Not going to happen by Carewolf · 2014-10-09 03:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

That is not dead which can eternal lie, in unmaintained hardware burried deep in your organization.

That's not how languages die by gurps_npc · 2014-10-09 03:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

Languages die when people stop using them, not when they cease to be 'hot'.

Look at human languages. They die when the last person speaking them dies. What makes anyone think computer languages are different?

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Re:That's not how languages die by T.E.D. · 2014-10-09 09:43 · Score: 4, Informative
Well, there are actually multiple levels of human language death.
1. Extinct - No living speakers.
2. Dead - Perhaps still known, but no longer used in general conversation
3. Pseudoextinct - No living speakers, but there are speakers of a child language
4. Moribund - Speakers are shifting to other languages. Nobody new is learning it.
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.

"Microsoft's long love of BASIC...." by markhb · 2014-10-09 03:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

From TFA:

Microsoft’s long love of the BASIC programming language extends all the way back to 1991, when the company purchased a pretty awesome (for its time) visual programming designer from Alan Cooper.

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).

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Re:"Microsoft's long love of BASIC...." by operagost · 2014-10-09 03:23 · Score: 3, Informative

It is a pretty ridiculous statement, considering that the BASICs for most early PCs and home computers came from Microsoft.

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Re:"Microsoft's long love of BASIC...." by tadas · 2014-10-09 03:33 · Score: 4, Informative

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/

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Re:"Microsoft's long love of BASIC...." by markhb · 2014-10-09 04:58 · Score: 2

If the WP article is accurate, Commodore's PET BASIC was a licensed Microsoft product, and as I mentioned so was the version in the TRS-80. So other than Apple's, I would say that the parent's statement that "the BASICs for most early PCs and home computers came from Microsoft", regardless of the fact that any other OS layer may or may not have, is accurate. And as others have pointed out, the first MS BASIC was in 1975 with the Altair, but I never used one of those so I went with "at least" as old as the TRS-80.

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Netcraft confirms it by Blackknight · 2014-10-09 03:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Let me save you some time by Somebody+Is+Using+My · 2014-10-09 03:23 · Score: 4, Informative

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

Re:Let me save you some time by TechyImmigrant · 2014-10-09 04:20 · Score: 4, Informative

That article was written by a youngster.
Pilot, PIC, mathchat, hypercard, IPL, SIMULA, etc.
These are the dying or dead languages.

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Re:Flash by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-09 03:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Re:Objective C, Ada, Tcl, Lisp by neoritter · 2014-10-09 03:24 · Score: 2

Ada is still around an quietly chugging along. It's still used in the fields it was designed for, missile systems etc. And they just had a new stable release just shy of two years ago.

Re:Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70 by LWATCDR · 2014-10-09 03:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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what we'd want to see... by buddyglass · 2014-10-09 03:29 · Score: 2

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.

Re:We got the kids a Kano ... by Chris+Mattern · 2014-10-09 03:33 · Score: 2

"The Kano"?

Well, it'd be appropriate to have a language named for an 80s cartoon character when the system is named for a 90s video game character...

Re:Logo? by Qzukk · 2014-10-09 03:39 · Score: 2

But APL lives on!

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Perl in Latin by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-09 03:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

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:Adoption by large organizations limits extincti by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2014-10-09 03:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 by David_Hart · 2014-10-09 03:57 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70 by Halo1 · 2014-10-09 04:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

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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Re:Single-language platforms by Austerity+Empowers · 2014-10-09 04:08 · Score: 2

Or you just keep writing in C and rely on tools to create code in those bullshit languages for you, because who wants to define their career by the platform-du-jour? Sure, someone will have to know C#,Java,ObjC,Swift,JS, but not really that many people.

This stuff would go away if we could just agree to boycott these things. Corporations know how to make products, they are absolutely terrible at creating anything that lasts.

wrong, LISP going strong by iggymanz · 2014-10-09 04:10 · Score: 2

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 article is on dice.com. by QuietLagoon · 2014-10-09 04:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

The purpose of the article is to make dice.com (/.'s owner) appear to be a place where people can go to read articles about job skills and such.

.
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.

Apple Pilot by TechyImmigrant · 2014-10-09 04:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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Re:Delphi has been dead for a long time by Windowser · 2014-10-09 05:34 · Score: 2

Has anyone seriously used this for anything other than writing Windows shareware in the 1990s?

Lots of big programs have been written in Delphi, the most famous one being Skype (before MS bought it and rewrote it. Note how it became huge and slow).

or had some way of using your existing C++ code they might have had a chance.

Delphi can actually compile C++ code.

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Useless article with no information content by WaffleMonster · 2014-10-09 05:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

PL/M by nateman1352 · 2014-10-09 05:54 · Score: 2

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.

not a worthwhile article by jlv · 2014-10-09 05:59 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Flash by GoodNewsJimDotCom · 2014-10-09 06:03 · Score: 2

Except for the fact that it is the best language to develop for mobile.

Its a very easy language to write in compared to C/C++, and it ports to Android/iOS/Web/Desktop(Linux/Mac/Windows).

The people in the know are writing cell phone/tablet aps in Adobe AIR now

Its actually quicker, more efficient, and you get more done in it than if you tried to code natively in Android or iOS.

Flash developers really have an unfair advantage to developing aps :) But you guys just keep saying its dying.

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What a shit article. by Xaemyl · 2014-10-09 06:41 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70 by Wdomburg · 2014-10-09 06:48 · Score: 2

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.

mentioned? by mrego · 2014-10-09 06:55 · Score: 2

Has RPG been mentioned? Or languages such as BLISS ? BCPL ? WATFOR? SPITBOL? SAIL ?

Article is pure clickbait. by blerg · 2014-10-09 09:51 · Score: 2

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.

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