COBOL and Lisp are not _trendy_ but they are _hugely_ popular in certain fields. Interestingly the reason they have not blossomed into old age is because they

COBOL and Lisp are not _trendy_ but they are _hugely_ popular in certain fields. Interestingly the reason they have not blossomed into old age is because they have exactly the opposite reputations: Lisp is hard to create but elegant when you have it right, COBOL is hard to replace, and inelegant wherever it lives on. Perl was trendy but unmaintainable and often replaceable, so it was replaced. Smalltalk lives on mostly through its ideas manifesting themselves in Ruby. It is still popular in certain fields, particularly those where "minicomputers" once reigned: business critical 9-figure turnover manufacturing sort of businesses. Python has had longer to build traction, and so far has kept it - I'm arguing it might be about to pass.