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Probably in a thousand years nobody will be writing C++. In one year, there will still be a helluva lot of C++, including new projects. Point being, the premis

Probably in a thousand years nobody will be writing C++. In one year, there will still be a helluva lot of C++, including new projects. Point being, the premise of your argument isn't granted. Is C++ going away soon? Or is it holding steady and even growing? How can someone objectively know either way?

moregrist 3y ago
It’s hard to predict much about 10 years out, let alone 1000. But we keep expecting languages like COBOL and MUMPS to die, and they keep living on. I think there’s a almost 100% chance that 1000 years from now, when all that’s left of human civilization is a bunch of bots trading hustle culture spam and culture war arguments on a zombie internet, that the whole thing will still run on some mission critical code written in C. Buggy, unsafe, but mission critical and hard to replace. And of course there will be heated bot arguments about how it should all be scrapped and rewritten in Rust++.
- Aeolos 3y ago
  If AI maintains a decent rate of advancement, it will eventually become possible to just ask an AI to... rewrite it in a different language. You can already give GPT a decent-sized chunk of C code and ask it to rewrite it in, say, Rust, and it works with some rate of success. For the last 50 years, this was impossible to do in a generic way. In the last 6 months, we managed to move the needle from impossible to possible. Give it another 12000 months, and what are the chances this would not move towards "trivial"?
  - moregrist 3y ago
    Sure. But that's not what keeps systems written in COBOL or MUMPS. It's not what's kept the US air traffic control system running on 1970s-era hardware and software until very recently. Humans are perfectly capable of rewriting these systems. AI will be, as well. The problem with changing a mission-critical system is risk, and cost. Maybe omniscient AIs in 3023 won't have this issue, but my ghost will be entirely unsurprised if there are still mission critical systems written in C laying around because whatever benefits are rewrite would give are dwarfed by the risk, perceived or real, of what happens if the rewrite isn't 100% perfect or doesn't 100% match the current system.
indymike 3y ago
> Is C++ going away soon? Or is it holding steady and even growing? How can someone objectively know either way? No. It's not going away anytime soon, but you can look at high-performance languages that are gaining in popularity, and that may point to change in the future. TIOBE isn't perfect, but it's a good indicator of interest, and Rust and Go seem to continue to gain popularity. Interestingly, and related to this article, Fortran has moved up from #31 to #20 on TIOBE's index, which really does speak to the importance of a math-optimized, high performance, compiled language. Another interesting change is MATLAB moving up from #20 to #14.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  for contrast, tiobe also believes visual basic classic (a language which hasn't been supported since 2008) is also in the top 20
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Having seen banking stacks, I'm inclined to believe TIOBE.
  - PLenz 3y ago
    Most programming is not the kind programming you see talked about on HN. VB is still huge in legacy stacks.
    - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
      right, but how much of that code is using a version of the language that hasn't been supported for 15 years? according to tiobe the answer is more than the amount of bash,powershell, and perl put together (and the amount is dramatically increasing)
- westurner 3y ago
  TIOBE index is rivaled by the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey in some regards https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula... : > Most popular technologies This year, we're comparing the popular technologies across three different groups: All respondents, Professional Developers, and those that are learning to code. Most popular technologies > Programming, scripting, and markup languages The Top 500 Green500 (and the TechEmpower Web Framework benchmarks) are also great resources for estimating what people did this past year; what are the "BigE" of our models in terms of water, kwh of [directly or PPA-offset] sourced clean energy.

moregrist 3y ago

It’s hard to predict much about 10 years out, let alone 1000. But we keep expecting languages like COBOL and MUMPS to die, and they keep living on. I think there’s a almost 100% chance that 1000 years from now, when all that’s left of human civilization is a bunch of bots trading hustle culture spam and culture war arguments on a zombie internet, that the whole thing will still run on some mission critical code written in C. Buggy, unsafe, but mission critical and hard to replace. And of course there will be heated bot arguments about how it should all be scrapped and rewritten in Rust++.

Aeolos 3y ago
If AI maintains a decent rate of advancement, it will eventually become possible to just ask an AI to... rewrite it in a different language. You can already give GPT a decent-sized chunk of C code and ask it to rewrite it in, say, Rust, and it works with some rate of success. For the last 50 years, this was impossible to do in a generic way. In the last 6 months, we managed to move the needle from impossible to possible. Give it another 12000 months, and what are the chances this would not move towards "trivial"?
- moregrist 3y ago
  Sure. But that's not what keeps systems written in COBOL or MUMPS. It's not what's kept the US air traffic control system running on 1970s-era hardware and software until very recently. Humans are perfectly capable of rewriting these systems. AI will be, as well. The problem with changing a mission-critical system is risk, and cost. Maybe omniscient AIs in 3023 won't have this issue, but my ghost will be entirely unsurprised if there are still mission critical systems written in C laying around because whatever benefits are rewrite would give are dwarfed by the risk, perceived or real, of what happens if the rewrite isn't 100% perfect or doesn't 100% match the current system.

indymike 3y ago

> Is C++ going away soon? Or is it holding steady and even growing? How can someone objectively know either way? No. It's not going away anytime soon, but you can look at high-performance languages that are gaining in popularity, and that may point to change in the future. TIOBE isn't perfect, but it's a good indicator of interest, and Rust and Go seem to continue to gain popularity. Interestingly, and related to this article, Fortran has moved up from #31 to #20 on TIOBE's index, which really does speak to the importance of a math-optimized, high performance, compiled language. Another interesting change is MATLAB moving up from #20 to #14.

adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
for contrast, tiobe also believes visual basic classic (a language which hasn't been supported since 2008) is also in the top 20
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Having seen banking stacks, I'm inclined to believe TIOBE.
- PLenz 3y ago
  Most programming is not the kind programming you see talked about on HN. VB is still huge in legacy stacks.
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    right, but how much of that code is using a version of the language that hasn't been supported for 15 years? according to tiobe the answer is more than the amount of bash,powershell, and perl put together (and the amount is dramatically increasing)
westurner 3y ago
TIOBE index is rivaled by the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey in some regards https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula... : > Most popular technologies This year, we're comparing the popular technologies across three different groups: All respondents, Professional Developers, and those that are learning to code. Most popular technologies > Programming, scripting, and markup languages The Top 500 Green500 (and the TechEmpower Web Framework benchmarks) are also great resources for estimating what people did this past year; what are the "BigE" of our models in terms of water, kwh of [directly or PPA-offset] sourced clean energy.