Goodbye, World? 5 Languages That Might Not Be Long For This World 547
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.
If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (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.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:4, Funny)
Hah! German will never die!!
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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 did
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Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (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... (Score:4, 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.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:5, Insightful)
If only Python and Ruby offered something similar to Perl's "use strict".
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:5, 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... (Score:4, 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.
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> 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 [mozilla.org]:
Didn't we learn anything from BASIC in the 80's??
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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... (Score:4, Funny)
Long Live Lisp!
Parenthesis Parenthesis Everywhere... No white space required ;-)
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Duck-typing is fundamental to program polymorphism. It wouldn't be an object-oriented language without duck-typing.
I like Python. It's a strong, dynamically-typed language, and strong typing is critical for programmer success. Many a perl programmer have spent their frustrations trying to track down a problem caused by passing a string as an integer; and many have left forehead-shaped craters upon their desks and keyboards trying to make Perl interpret a string consisting entirely of numerical character
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (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... (Score:5, 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.
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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 sim
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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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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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 Pyth
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:5, 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.
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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.
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:4, Insightful)
If that were the case, PHP would have occupied all 5 slots.
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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
Re:If you wanted us to believe your Op-Ed... (Score:4, 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.
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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... (Score:4, Informative)
Python can actually be parallelized for certain tasks [speakerdeck.com]. 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.
Who cares? (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?
Single-language platforms (Score:2)
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.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that skills in the language will help you put food on the table. For example, if one popular client platform requires that all programs be written in C#,* and another requires either Objective-C++ or Swift, and another requires Java,** and another requires JavaScript,*** then companies hiring programmers will disproportionately demand those languages.
* The platforms I'm thinking of require verifiably type-safe CIL compatible with the .NET Compact Framework, which in prac
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Knowledge of a variety of programming languages, even if some of them are dead, will always help. Even if it's just in "I remember when Perl was still a thing" bragging competitions.
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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.
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PL/M (Score:3)
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 forwar
Adoption by large organizations limits extinction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Adoption by large organizations limits extincti (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.
Ruby? (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!).
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And completely forgetting that both Puppet and Chef are both ruby based and not going anywhere. Rails may die.
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Exactly. In fact, Puppet is why I'm learning Ruby, as we are doing Puppet-based deployment these days.
Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet (Score:5, 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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"It's way too handy and there's no alternative."
My understanding is that, with very few (and increasingly fewer with each new version) exceptions, anything you can do in VB.NET, you can do in C#. Does Office only understand VB.NET?
Re:Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet (Score:4, Informative)
VBA != VB.Net
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No, the primary Office applications that like to use VB.net can also use C# instead.
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"It's way too handy and there's no alternative."
My understanding is that, with very few (and increasingly fewer with each new version) exceptions, anything you can do in VB.NET, you can do in C#. Does Office only understand VB.NET?
The Office functions might be known to C#, but Office admins (those creating/maintaining the scripts) definitely do not know C#.
Re:Perl and VBA will live for a long while yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummm, no. (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! (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? (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 [metacpan.org] 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!
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It's used in a ton of places in the bowels of big companies as well.
Flash (Score:2, Flamebait)
Also on the list: Adobe Flash. Please let them be correct about this. No more Flash. Anywhere. Ever.
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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 pla
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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
Scripting language du jour (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Scripting language du jour (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.
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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 i
Maybe Perl is just "complete," not dying. (Score:5, 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. (Score:4, 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.
Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70's) (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Pascal: Delphi still lives.
Re:Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70 (Score:4, 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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I still hack around in Pascal from time to time. Kyan Pascal produces good results on my Apple IIe when I'm in the mood, and I dink around on System 7 from time to time on my old Quadra and all the libraries and toolkits for the Mac from back then are better supported in Pascal.
I don't think it has any practical use nowadays, even with Lazarus out there, but it's still fun if you're into the vintage scene.
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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,
Re:Thinking back to my undergraduate days (late 70 (Score:5, 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 [freepascal.org], 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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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.
COBOL - (Perl,Ruby)? (Score:3)
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.
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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.
Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not dead which can eternal lie, in unmaintained hardware burried deep in your organization.
That's not how languages die (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at human languages. They die when the last person speaking them dies. What makes anyone think computer languages are different?
Re:That's not how languages die (Score:5, Informative)
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.
First, define your terms (Score:2)
"Microsoft's long love of BASIC...." (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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If the WP article [wikipedia.org] 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
Re:"Microsoft's long love of BASIC...." (Score:5, 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/ [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, seriously... (Score:2)
Microsoft's Very First product, written before Bill Gates even dropped out of college, was BASIC for the Altair 8k. This dates it back to '75.
Netcraft confirms it (Score:4, 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 (Score:5, 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 (Score:5, Informative)
That article was written by a youngster.
Pilot, PIC, mathchat, hypercard, IPL, SIMULA, etc.
These are the dying or dead languages.
Latin? (Score:2)
Perl in Latin (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.
APL (Score:2)
what we'd want to see... (Score:3)
When does a language die. (Score:2)
The article is on dice.com. (Score:5, Insightful)
.
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 (Score:4, 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 [wikipedia.org]
Useless article with no information content (Score:4, 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.
not a worthwhile article (Score:3)
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: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
I'm unsure if you're suggesting Ada is dead, should die, or don't want it to.
Re: (Score:3)
"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... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
But APL lives on!
wrong, LISP going strong (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.