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Five Programming Languages That Are Probably Doomed

16 points by dcu 7y ago

mark_l_watson 7y ago
I would bet all five languages are still in common use in ten years. The language most likely to fade away though might be Objective C since Apple really is pushing Swift and new frameworks built with Swift.
- lenkite 7y ago
  Many cross platform native apps are built in C++. Until Swift does C++ interop well, it is unlikely they will be re-written in Swift. Facebook uses Objective C++ - you can mix Objective C and C++ in the same source and use C++ containers/STL on objective-C objects, etc. This is a massive convenience.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Yet only Apple old timer devs have the Objective-C++ documentation lying around, since Apple has removed all ways to access it since they purged old docs. However one thing is true actually, C++ has a growing role in Apple platforms, given IO Kit, DriverKit and Metal Shaders.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
It's a generational thing as well. New programmers adopt whatever is fashionable when they start out and move on from there. Ten years ago that would be Ruby and quite a few Ruby developers ended up in e.g. the Elixir and Rust communities. Five years ago that would have been Javascript. Today that would be Typescript and lots of Javascript developers would have progressed to that naturally (as well as Go, Rust, and a few other languages). This is significant because the number of programmers world wide doubles every five years (https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html). So whomever was doing perl 20-25 years ago is outnumbered 16-32 x by everyone else in the business before you even consider the vast numbers of former perl developers that threw in the towel a long time ago. This means most new projects will bias to whatever skills are available cheaply (i.e. whatever is popular) and many of the relatively few older developers end up adapting to that. I actually know a couple of companies with some active perl code bases. Wouldn't touch it myself since I was an early Java adopter (now using Kotlin) but they seem to manage. Though I imagine finding more developers is going to be tough. Languages never die but they do tend to become shadows of their former glory. I don't think anyone would suggest using Cobol for a new project at this point in time. It's been considered a legacy language for as long as I've been programming (since the late eighties). It's dead as door nail; never coming back. But you can still make good money maintaining code written nearly half a century ago.
erik_seaberg 7y ago
Their take on Haskell reminds me of "Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me." I'm a little surprised PureScript didn't come up at all; that has intriguing potential to interop with Javascript and now also Go.
a_bonobo 7y ago
R is going away??!?!? The tidyverse, Rstudio, and modern ecosystems like bioconductor have led to a huge boom in the use of R in life sciences, to the point that I teach more Python than R. I reckon R is now the language of choice if you are starting out in the life sciences/biology. RLadies chapters are sprouting up like nobody's business all over the world! And they don't even know about the big projects that connect R and Python, like Rstudio's reticulate.

16 points by dcu 7y ago

I would bet all five languages are still in common use in ten years. The language most likely to fade away though might be Objective C since Apple really is pushing Swift and new frameworks built with Swift.

lenkite 7y ago
Many cross platform native apps are built in C++. Until Swift does C++ interop well, it is unlikely they will be re-written in Swift. Facebook uses Objective C++ - you can mix Objective C and C++ in the same source and use C++ containers/STL on objective-C objects, etc. This is a massive convenience.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Yet only Apple old timer devs have the Objective-C++ documentation lying around, since Apple has removed all ways to access it since they purged old docs. However one thing is true actually, C++ has a growing role in Apple platforms, given IO Kit, DriverKit and Metal Shaders.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

It's a generational thing as well. New programmers adopt whatever is fashionable when they start out and move on from there. Ten years ago that would be Ruby and quite a few Ruby developers ended up in e.g. the Elixir and Rust communities. Five years ago that would have been Javascript. Today that would be Typescript and lots of Javascript developers would have progressed to that naturally (as well as Go, Rust, and a few other languages). This is significant because the number of programmers world wide doubles every five years (https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html). So whomever was doing perl 20-25 years ago is outnumbered 16-32 x by everyone else in the business before you even consider the vast numbers of former perl developers that threw in the towel a long time ago. This means most new projects will bias to whatever skills are available cheaply (i.e. whatever is popular) and many of the relatively few older developers end up adapting to that. I actually know a couple of companies with some active perl code bases. Wouldn't touch it myself since I was an early Java adopter (now using Kotlin) but they seem to manage. Though I imagine finding more developers is going to be tough. Languages never die but they do tend to become shadows of their former glory. I don't think anyone would suggest using Cobol for a new project at this point in time. It's been considered a legacy language for as long as I've been programming (since the late eighties). It's dead as door nail; never coming back. But you can still make good money maintaining code written nearly half a century ago.

erik_seaberg 7y ago

Their take on Haskell reminds me of "Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me." I'm a little surprised PureScript didn't come up at all; that has intriguing potential to interop with Javascript and now also Go.

a_bonobo 7y ago

R is going away??!?!? The tidyverse, Rstudio, and modern ecosystems like bioconductor have led to a huge boom in the use of R in life sciences, to the point that I teach more Python than R. I reckon R is now the language of choice if you are starting out in the life sciences/biology. RLadies chapters are sprouting up like nobody's business all over the world! And they don't even know about the big projects that connect R and Python, like Rstudio's reticulate.