
Myth of Dying Programming Language and Framework - xet7
https://blog.wekan.team/2018/05/myth-of-dying-programming-language-and-framework/index.html
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eesmith
The author writes "Programming language dies, when somebody deletes all code
and documentation files and backups of files, books, papers etc from
everywhere in the world."

I disagree. That's not the definition that people use when they say that a
human language is dead, and it shouldn't be the definition people use when
describing a computer language.

Latin is a dead language. That doesn't mean that no one speaks it, nor does it
mean that no literature is available in Latin. It's still an official language
of the Vatican. There's also Nuntii Latini, a news service which broadcasts in
Latin. They've had to make up vocabulary for concepts which didn't exist 2,000
years ago.

But Latin is still a dead language.

Similarly, PL/I is a dead computer language. Sure, there's still support for
it ([https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-
bin/ssialias?subtype=c...](https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-
bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS217-352) ). But
it's a dead language.

So is SNOBOL and its many variants.

So is TRAC, despite the many fans who learned about it through Nelson's 1974
book "Computer Lib".

Hieroglyphic Egyptian is a dead language, even though people can read and
write it.

So is cgi-lib.pl, which was the most popular web framework back when Perl4
ruled the web. (I checked; last update was 19 years ago.)

