Fortran 77 is still pretty widely used in physics, with some relaxed compiler rules that make it a little less ugly. Fortran 90 is however, I find, a lot more

Fortran 77 is still pretty widely used in physics, with some relaxed compiler rules that make it a little less ugly. Fortran 90 is however, I find, a lot more like Pascal. I suspect you're right on Java surviving as a legacy language. While I'm not sure (and really don't care) if Java or the JVM will survive for an extended period of time, I do find it interesting to note that programming languages seem to be comparatively resilient to change relative to everything else in computing. While the FORTRAN in that photo looks odd, it's still a comparatively small gap between it and FORTRAN from 40 years later than if we were to compare the operating systems, applications or user interfaces from similar time spans. I can still figure out what it's supposed to do. I'd be completely lost if you put me on a batch terminal or a VAX/VMS prompt. The last really transformational idea in programming languages hit the world the same year I was born -- in 1980 -- with Smalltalk. There are a lot of variations on the themes of functional, imperative, and object oriented languages, and I expect new metaphors will evolve, but it's interesting seeing that really, now for at least the last almost 30 years, we've basically been remixing ideas. And that's where I'd revisit Java for a moment -- perhaps the only transformational change that it brought to the table was the use of a formalized VM in a widely popular language. Even if Java's VM doesn't survive, I'm pretty sure that's a notion that we'll still have in programming environments for many decades out.