I started writing in C back in the late ‘70s. At the time BASIC, Fortran, and COBOL dominated, and Pascal was the supposed future, the Rust of its day. C still

I started writing in C back in the late ‘70s. At the time BASIC, Fortran, and COBOL dominated, and Pascal was the supposed future, the Rust of its day. C still relevant today, the others not so much. I learned SQL in the mid-80s, still relevant, I haven’t worked on a business application or web site that doesn’t use SQL in 20 years of web development. I started working with PHP in 2000, when my employer ditched ASP to save money on licensing. More relevant today than ever, and I don’t expect it to go away because of the huge installed base and good fit to requirements. The cool languages that will supposedly take over almost never do. Smalltalk, anyone? At various times in my career I heard that Modula 2, Ada, and even Scheme would dominate programming. Instead we got C++ and Java from out of left field, and Javascript now sits near the top of most-used languages. Languages don’t “win” or even survive based on technical merits or programmer preference. They either solve problems and attract a community that leads to critical mass, or they don’t. I’ll be surprised if even 3 of the 7 languages listed in the article have widespread use in 5 years.