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I think the meaningful definition of “dead language” is “nobody will begin a new code base in it any more, except as a hobby or research project”. Pretty likel
by gumby 3y ago
I think the meaningful definition of “dead language” is “nobody will begin a new code base in it any more, except as a hobby or research project”.
Pretty likely that’s the case with COBOL, definitely Algol, PL/1, Pascal, and Prolog.
Though uncommon or domain specific, not the case with APL (well J), Common Lisp, Forth, or Haskell.
I think there’s more new code being written in FORTRAN these days than in those last four combined.
- sspiff 3y agoThere's still a small-ish community working on and building new things with FreePascal.
- gumby 3y agoI may not be a Pascal fan but still I’m delighted to learn this.
- DeathArrow 3y agoSame for me. After using Basic on ZX Spectrum, Pascal was the first evolved programming language I've learned. And, at it's time, it was quite good.
- LeFantome 3y agoAlive, kicking, and actually supported by some decent cooling. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- anta40 3y agoPascal is certainly not dead, at least some friends who are Delphi folks use it both for work and side projects. On the other side... not sure how many newbies learn Pascal these days, though.
- ahoka 3y agoSome people learn Latin and it’s used for naming organisms. Still a dead language.
- arghwhat 3y agoNot by OPs definition. You also wouldn't call the newer invented languages like Esperanto dead, and yet there's more people who know and can speak Latin (using one of the modern pronunciations)...
- sandworm101 3y agoIt is the official language of the Vatican. That isnt nothing and probably saves latin from formal dead status imho. And lots of military organizations use it for mottos. So someone is out there creating new sentences with it on a semi-regular basis.
- moffkalast 3y agoLast I checked there were no people being born in Vatican nor had Latin as their first language, citizenship is only given based on the office you hold. It's pretty close to nothing, it's a corporate HQ with a language requirement. Dead languages aren't those who aren't being spoken or used anymore, it's those that have no native speakers. It's not something that's in any way compatible with programming languages.
- fasterik 3y agoLatin has no first-language speakers, so that makes it a dead language by definition. That's different from being an extinct language, which means that it would have no first- or second-language speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language
- andylynch 3y agoClassical languages like Latin are a bit of a special case - for instance new works and translations /imto/ Latin are still occasionally published (Hobbitus Ille for instance is stocked in certain bookstores here)
- jjgreen 3y agoThe all-caps spelling marks you out as an F77 veteran (or earlier!)
- gumby 3y agoHa ha yes, though I haven’t written a line of FORTRAN (nor fortran) in decades. It pains me to call CommonLisp obscure or uncommon because I used it heavily for a long time, but that’s the tough truth. It’s funny to think that one major criticism at the time was “its standard library is too massive” and now “its standard library is too small”. I don’t remember anyone even thinking such a thing about Fortran, perhaps because standard library didn’t really mean anything for Fortran and because there have been tons of 3P Fortran libraries in the PD since before I was born.
- fortran77 3y agoWHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS?
- augustk 3y agoAN APOSTROPHE IS MISSING.
- jjgreen 3y agoPEDANT
- withinboredom 3y agoThe Dutch really need to teach mierenneuker to more people. Antfucker is such an amazing term.
- kergonath 3y agoI am quite partial to sodomising flies, which is the French equivalent (used for the action, however, not the person doing it).
- lp4vn 3y agoUsing your definition I would argue that VBScript, Ceylon and CoffeeScript are also dead. Perl is seeing a strong decline and I think it will join the dead group in a few decades.
- HeckFeck 3y ago> Perl is seeing a strong decline and I think it will join the dead group in a few decades. A shame - I much prefer its take on a versatile, unixy scripting language. Much has been done to keep it alive - the comprehensive book Modern Perl, and the well-integrated Mojolicious web framework. But it doesn't seem to be enough. I'm the only one in my circles and age range who knows it, everyone else would reach for Python, shell or even JavaScript.
- DeathArrow 3y agoIsn't Delphi still used? And isn't Delphi still Pascal?
- projektfu 3y agoPascal is definitely somewhat alive, but way far from its heyday on DOS and Macintosh. For dead languages in the class, Modula-2 is mostly dead and Modula-3 is definitely dead. Forte TOOL is dead. Pascal has its niceties, especially enabling one-pass compilation and pretty clear code. It's neither overcomplicated like Ada nor relatively unknown like Modula-3.
- pjmlp 3y agoGNU Modula-2 just joined the set of official GCC supported languages on a full install, and is now listed on the set of languages that matter on Compiler Explorer.
- grose 3y agoWhile Prolog is niche it's still alive and kicking IMO. The go-to example for a 'modern' project is TerminusDB. I'm currently using Prolog for a greenfield expert system project at $work. There's been a bit of a Datalog resurgence as well, you can see it in the Biscuit authz system for example. As a fundamental pillar of logic programming, I don't think it will ever die (akin to Lisp and functional programming). Pure speculation here but I think we might see more interest towards symbolic AI in the coming years coupled with LLMs to ground answers against well-defined knowledge bases, as a sort of anti-hallucination measure.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoYeah for 'a dead language' there would only be ALGOL, PL/1, and not much else. Excluding really niche languages that never made it out the research lab in the first place.
- LeFantome 3y agoI didn’t even see Pascal on that list. Certainly not dead. Lazarus just had a release the other day.
- Koshkin 3y agoUndead, then? :)
- JeffSnazz 3y ago> against well-defined knowledge bases, as a sort of anti-hallucination measure. Given that humans don't have anything resembling well-defined knowledge I'm somewhat confused why this keeps coming up as something desirable.
- bionhoward 3y agoWhat makes you say that humans don’t have anything resembling well-defined knowledge?
- 3y ago
- pjmlp 3y agoEmbarcadero is still in business selling Delphi licenses, a new version was released last quarter, and there are enough companies in Europe, to at least have them in two German conferences, alongside Windows and .NET developers. COBOL and PL/I are still pretty alive for anyone working today on IBM and Unisys mainframes and microcomputers, regardless of bug fixes or new features.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> COBOL and PL/I are still pretty alive for anyone working today on IBM and Unisys mainframes and microcomputers, regardless of bug fixes or new features. Are they alive by gumby's definition of alive? Is anyone beginning new codebases in COBOL or PL/I, even on mainframes?
- pjmlp 3y agoA dead language is something like BLISS or Concurrent Pascal. Brown field development moves much more consulting money per year than green field development.
- jcranmer 3y agoNew versions of the COBOL standard are still coming out, so I'd guess that the answer is "yes".
- kjs3 3y agoYes, there are new COBOL code bases.
- araes 3y agoThe issue with COBOL (opinion) is that its used in "business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments" (development sponsored by the DoD) which all tend to be high money, secrecy, and competition. Plus, back in 2012, 60% of all companies surveyed still had COBOL in the back somewhere (2017: 43% of banking systems still used COBOL with over 220 billion lines of COBOL code). There might be stuff written COBOL, except they're never gonna share it with you, cause its far too important to the fight over the $100 trillion stock markets.
- ivanpribec 3y agoPersonally, I like to think of Fortran as the language of large-scale numerical PDE and eigenproblem solvers. Most scientific and engineering problems boil down to one of these two.
- gh02t 3y agoAt least in the US national lab system Fortran is nominally being phased out in a lot of projects. It's just gotten too hard to find highly skilled Fortran programmers to maintain these complicated projects, so a lot of codebases are gradually being moved away from it. However the reality is it's mostly aspirational; some of the large codebases have at least made big progress towards migrating onto C++ but the tail is very long indeed and it's still entrenched with many of the greybeard HPC folks. It's also tough to imagine some of the big legacy codes that are still heavily used in the nuclear industry (e.g. MNCP) migrating away due to the sheer amount of experimental validation that has been done on the existing Fortran code. I personally know and like Fortran in its modern form, at least within its little niche. But the ability to maintain these codes long term is really important and it's tough to see that being viable with the supply of professional-level developers withering to nothing.
- wbl 3y agoNational labs should be able to attract people who can learn Fortran well enough to maintain those codes. After all the hard part is the math, not the programming.
- segmondy 3y agoWow, folks are writing new code bases in Pascal and Prolog. At least that I know.
- sheepscreek 3y agoI think Prolog is still used in some niches. But that definition is apt. Fortran is far from dead. It might even be on the verge of a renaissance. Numpy took inspiration from Fortran and MATLAB. Most scientific computing libraries use Lapack and BLAS libraries under the hood (which were written in Fortran). Honestly, I think if Fortran had a few intuitive higher order abstractions/libraries - one wouldn’t need to mess around with C++. And now thinking more about it - it would be very cool to have a Numpy to Fortran transpiler.
- lagniappe 3y agoI still write Pascal today. N=1 but I wouldn't call it dead, there's a lot of us.
- nequo 3y agoDo you use it for new non-hobby projects? If yes, do you mind sharing what you build with it?
- omgmajk 3y agoOne of the new PS4 emulators is written in FreePascal, I see new projects popping up every now and then.
- z3phyr 3y agoA great game I play which was relatively recently released (HROT) is written in Pascal.
- LeFantome 3y agoProlog is dead? I was thinking of learning it.
- kaba0 3y agoHaskell is definitely not like the others and your last statement would be untrue with that on the list.
- Koshkin 3y agoIt is believed that Prolog is "a better version of SQL."
- kazinator 3y agoIs there such a voracious need for more and more new numerical libraries?
- BeFlatXIII 3y agoBe sure to add MUMPS to the list of dead languages with large, actively-maintained legacy codebases.