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!).
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.
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
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.
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 is not dead which can eternal lie, in unmaintained hardware burried deep in your organization.
Look at human languages. They die when the last person speaking them dies. What makes anyone think computer languages are different?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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
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.
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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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 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.
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.