
Five Programming Languages That Are Probably Doomed - dcu
https://insights.dice.com/2019/07/29/5-programming-languages-probably-doomed/
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jillesvangurp
It's a generational thing as well. New programmers adopt whatever is
fashionable when they start out and move on from there. Ten years ago that
would be Ruby and quite a few Ruby developers ended up in e.g. the Elixir and
Rust communities. Five years ago that would have been Javascript. Today that
would be Typescript and lots of Javascript developers would have progressed to
that naturally (as well as Go, Rust, and a few other languages).

This is significant because the number of programmers world wide doubles every
five years ([https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html](https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html)). So whomever was doing perl 20-25 years ago is
outnumbered 16-32 x by everyone else in the business before you even consider
the vast numbers of former perl developers that threw in the towel a long time
ago. This means most new projects will bias to whatever skills are available
cheaply (i.e. whatever is popular) and many of the relatively few older
developers end up adapting to that.

I actually know a couple of companies with some active perl code bases.
Wouldn't touch it myself since I was an early Java adopter (now using Kotlin)
but they seem to manage. Though I imagine finding more developers is going to
be tough. Languages never die but they do tend to become shadows of their
former glory. I don't think anyone would suggest using Cobol for a new project
at this point in time. It's been considered a legacy language for as long as
I've been programming (since the late eighties). It's dead as door nail; never
coming back. But you can still make good money maintaining code written nearly
half a century ago.

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mark_l_watson
I would bet all five languages are still in common use in ten years. The
language most likely to fade away though might be Objective C since Apple
really is pushing Swift and new frameworks built with Swift.

~~~
lenkite
Many cross platform native apps are built in C++. Until Swift does C++ interop
well, it is unlikely they will be re-written in Swift. Facebook uses Objective
C++ - you can mix Objective C and C++ in the same source and use C++
containers/STL on objective-C objects, etc. This is a _massive_ convenience.

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pjmlp
Yet only Apple old timer devs have the Objective-C++ documentation lying
around, since Apple has removed all ways to access it since they purged old
docs.

However one thing is true actually, C++ has a growing role in Apple platforms,
given IO Kit, DriverKit and Metal Shaders.

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a_bonobo
R is going away??!?!? The tidyverse, Rstudio, and modern ecosystems like
bioconductor have led to a huge boom in the use of R in life sciences, to the
point that I teach more Python than R. I reckon R is now the language of
choice if you are starting out in the life sciences/biology. RLadies chapters
are sprouting up like nobody's business all over the world!

And they don't even know about the big projects that connect R and Python,
like Rstudio's reticulate.

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erik_seaberg
Their take on Haskell reminds me of "Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual
to me." I'm a little surprised PureScript didn't come up at all; that has
intriguing potential to interop with Javascript and now also Go.

