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If you have to write forceful "It's not dead! Really!" blog posts, it kind of gives away the Weekend at Bernie's game. Snark aside, to try and add something mo
by davidw 5y ago
If you have to write forceful "It's not dead! Really!" blog posts, it kind of gives away the Weekend at Bernie's game.
Snark aside, to try and add something more useful, having seen languages rise and fall, it seems that "not growing" or "gradually losing ground" are kind of what people label as "dead". If lots of people aren't regularly starting new projects with it... it's not healthy.
I wrote something similar about Tcl years ago: https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went...
- newaccount2021 5y agoI love perl and simultaneously totally at-peace with it being "dead"...but it really isn't. Packages I care about are updated regularly. The core release is deployed regularly. There are numerous meaningful improvements discussed on p5p. Fastmail, my email provider, runs on perl. You can get perl jobs in 2021. The community is smaller now but more dedicated - not growing, but not dead either. In any case, none of the moderately popular languages will die anytime soon...between the platforms that still run on them, and the geezers who have the time in retirement to volunteer, tools will survive
- davidw 5y ago> none of the moderately popular languages will die anytime soon Correct. As long as people are using stuff in production, the high costs of switching ensure that some maintenance will keep happening. That's why we still have things like COBOL, even though I don't think much of anyone is all that enthusiastic about it.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago>If you have to write forceful "It's not dead! Really!" blog posts How is this different from modern languages making similar posts about how they're very active?
- justinator 5y agoSaying, "we're very active" is a different framing than saying, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated".
- coldtea 5y agoBecause "we're active" is something you want to see in a language - even if the language has little adoption, being active is positive. "We're not dead" on the other hand is defensive. Even if the language has a big community still, it means people are leaving. And the thing is new users seldom go to big but dying languages. They'd rather go to small but growing languages (which at least are more exciting), but even more probably, they'll go to medium to big but growing languages.
- acemarke 5y agoHeh, I wrote "Redux - Not Dead Yet!" in 2018 [0] to counteract FUD from the Twitterati, and updated it again in 2020. If nothing else, it's saved me from having to rewrite the exact same answer hundreds of times in separate replies. Happily, threads like this recent "Redux Toolkit is awesome!" Reddit thread [1] show that our efforts to keep improving Redux and let people know about "Modern Redux" (the combo of Redux Toolkit + React-Redux hooks) [2] have been bearing fruit. [0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-yet/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-yet... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/px6kxy/redux_toolkit_is_awesome/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/px6kxy/redux_toolk... [2] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structure https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structu...