Hey, that's a hardware description language!
If you were perverse enough to pervert it to run some kind of script, I'd call you out as some kind of pervert!
Posted on 06/12/2021 9:01:32 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s the programming equivalent of the circle of life: programming languages are created, gain popularity, hit their peak, and slowly degrade until nobody uses them anymore. With some languages, this process is fairly rapid, especially if the language in question never sees much adoption; others are decades old and still going strong.
For developers, knowing which languages will fade is a crucial issue: It’s hard to earn money off programming in a language that nobody really uses anymore. Here are five languages that won’t disappear tomorrow, but the long-term trends definitely don’t look good.
In the TIOBE Index, R has tumbled from 15th to 18th place over the past year. There’s a solid reason behind this: although it emerged as a strong language for data analytics (itself a burgeoning field), R has lost ground to Python, which has proven as useful for data analysis as it has for other kinds of programming work.
R faces the same situation as many highly specialized languages: a steady rise thanks to a relatively small group of loyal specialists and subject-matter experts—many of whom begin to drift away once they realize that they can use another programming language that works roughly as well. In addition, workers entering the field for the first time may choose to go with the more general-purpose language over the specialized one, figuring they can use the former for other functions, besides.
Like other, highly specialized languages, R probably won’t disappear completely. But if Python becomes data analysts’ language of choice, it could end up reduced to relatively few users.
In 2014, Apple launched Swift, its general-purpose language for building iOS, macOS, and watchOS apps. It was meant to work with Apple’s existing frameworks and programming infrastructure; more to the point, the company wanted its developer ecosystem to use it in place of Objective-C, which is over three decades old.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Objective-C’s predicted obsolescence: the language refused to die. Maybe that’s due to the enormous number of apps written in it, or maybe because developers who learned Objective-C aren’t quite ready to commit to learning Swift yet; maybe it’s a combination of both. Whatever the case, Objective-C has maintained a (slowly declining) presence on various popular-languages lists.
All that being said, Apple is determined to replace Objective-C with Swift. It’s going to happen. It might just take longer than the company expects.
R might have tumbled quite a bit in the TIOBE Index over the past 12 months, but it has nothing on Visual Basic, which fell from 13th place to 19th over the same period. It’s also dipped in RedMonk’s long-term language rankings, although not quite as much.
In many ways, this decline isn’t surprising: Visual Basic is a really old language, having first appeared on the scene in 1991, and if there’s any truism in the technology world, it’s that older technologies are inevitably eclipsed by the new. Plus, Microsoft stopped supporting Visual Basic quite some time ago. And yet, according to the sites that monitor the relative popularity of programming languages, this platform continues to hold on—there must be a substantial number of hobbyists out there, or else tech pros tasked with maintaining legacy code.
Rather than learn Visual Basic, which will completely fade from view at some point, it’s worth your time to educate yourself in the particulars of its successor, Visual Basic .NET, an object-oriented programming language that launched in 2002 and continues to power the building of Windows apps. It’s safe to say that Microsoft isn’t going to stop supporting Visual basic .NET anytime soon, given its importance to the contemporary Windows ecosystem. (If you’re unfamiliar with Visual Basic .NET, note that Microsoft doesn’t use ‘.NET’ in its documentation, which can lead to some confusion between the contemporary .NET and “classic” Visual Basic.)
At one point, Perl seemed ubiquitous, and developers used it to build some of the biggest websites of yesteryear, including Craigslist and Slashdot. It was also useful for prototyping new, smaller programs, or creating wrapper functions.
Perl was doing so well for so long—it even broke into the top 10 of the TIOBE Index (peaking in ninth place) before tumbling to 16th. But it’s also a language in serious decline. In 2000, Perl creator (and the language’s “benevolent dictator for life”) Larry Wall announced that work had begun on Perl 6, the language’s next big iteration; it’s now 2018, and while the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler is in active development (targeting MoarVM and the Java Virtual Machine), momentum for the project seems to have frittered away. Smaller updates, meanwhile, continue on Perl 5 (which is up to 5.28).
What drove Perl’s decline? Some experts think that Python, which occupies much of the same programming “niche,” had something to do with it. “Perl’s eventual problem is that if the Perl community cannot attract beginner users like Python successfully has, it runs the risk of become like Children of Men, dwindling away to a standstill; vast repositories of hieroglyphic code looming in sections of the Internet and in data center partitions like the halls of the Mines of Moria,” Conor Myhrvold wrote for Fast Company in 2014. Not much has changed since.
If you’re a COBOL programmer, chances are good you can land a job at a major institution that’s maintained a COBOL codebase since before you were born. Indeed, an industry-wide shortage of COBOL programmers means that such positions can provide quite a comfortable salary (the Dice Salary Calculator suggests $79,000 per year isn’t out of the question in California).
But sooner or later, COBOL is going to fade away as companies replace their tech stacks, especially if they opt for cloud-based solutions over on-premises. If you plan on having a decades-long career as a programmer, COBOL probably won’t be a factor in your mid- to late career.
Bookmark.
I nominate SAP ABAP because I can say with authority that SAP has lost its way and become shit-tastric.
For me, it was PL/I, a loonnnggg time ago.
$79K being "comfortable" in California? In the cities that most likely have the institutions needing COBOL coding?
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
PERL huh? I write it every day, even today. (Data processing with no GUI. Reformatting data, slapping it into a database, and generating reports.) There’s also Python (for NEW development), and BASH to run things.
I was learning BASIC in high school, and teaching myself 6502 assembly language at night.
I used something called FORMAC which was a superset of PL/1 and compiled on the PL/1 optimizing compiler. I can’t find it anywhere now. I was looking for an implementation that would run on a PC... or at least on something that would run on a mainframe emulator... I think the emulator is called Hercules.
I learned COBOL, RPG2 and BASIC in 1975, never used it.
Does this mean that MUMPS and SNOBOL survive?
Hey, that's a hardware description language!
If you were perverse enough to pervert it to run some kind of script, I'd call you out as some kind of pervert!
“teaching myself 6502 assembly language at night.”
Left programming long ago, but remember doing that too.
I still run an old Perl program - a modification of one I wrote in 1999. Probably time to convert it to Python. :)
I did manage to occasionally get turn times in low teens of minutes, but only at 3 AM, and that only if The High Priest on duty was bored or feeling generous, and I promised to never tell anyone. So I never did, until now...
This article was published on August 21, 2018.
I took COBOL, Fortran, Assembler, and RPG II when I was in college working on my data processing degree. The first job I got in IT was to batch process COBOL-based databases and recompile them into a newer format. The program was already pre-written and debugged, all I had to do was use command lines at the prompt to execute whatever batches I wanted, then format and print them into a corresponding spreadsheet. I veered off into the desktop and network realm, but my brother-in-law had just finished his degree and got a job in ‘98 or’99 to pull old databases and programs, and update it into a newer programming language that wouldn’t cripple the old COBOL-based stuff in the process. (Y2K pearl-clutching and all that - I worked a contract for that, too.) I remember employers offering fat bucks to old retirees who were utilizing COBOL-driven mainframes back in the ‘60’s, then cashed out in the 80’s and 90’s, took their pensions and their Social Security, and were out on Caribbean cruises half the year. Some places were paying programmers by the line, not as salary. If you were fast, they’d load you up with as much work as you could handle, and my brother-in-law-had fingers that were greased lightning. For almost two years, he was pulling down a hard six figures because of that and his ability to focus. Afterwards, he said he was glad it was over. The money was stoopid good, but the job was so high-intensity and production driven, he was just frazzled to the core. By The Lords of COBOL, I can’t believe that language is still around. I don’t remember a single switch or command, but I can still see the textual formatting in my mind. *Brrrr*
“Add English”
I suppose you object to replacing “Mom” with “Birthing Person”? Get with the program!
I did a data conversion for a company that was actually splitting into two entities. I took the file sorted it by something in the file and punched it to a card deck. Split the card deck and gave each to the lead of each of the entities.
It’s in your video cards and runs GPUs for AI and gaming.
I prefer Pascal (Delphi,Lazarus) but most of what I do I do using plain old C.
I have enjoyed, toiled and suffered using the following...in chronological order of adoption.
BASIC
6502 asm
PL1
COBOL
Pascal
X86 asm
C
ARM asm
When I was in college, we still registered for classes with IBM cards.
CC
Just thinking about Programming gives me a headache.
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