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.
I never met anyone who’d coded in APL, but I read several articles in Byte Magazine around it and was very intrigued.
APL was the first language I learned to program in at a level greater than very simple loops like generating the Fibonacci series, etc. I used it a lot when I was in high school because I had access to computer time on a university-owned IBM 370 via an APL workspace. I soon lost interest in it though as more structured languages began to take over, and as BASIC began to be used to program laboratory computers for data collection, analysis, etc. This was in the early- to mid=70s time frame, around 50 years ago.
During the '80s I switched to assembler programming as I learned to use microprocessors and worked on a few microprocessor projects. I did a fairly involved one using the RCA 1802, and magnetic bubble memory.
I learned to program in Pascal for a job I had in the late '70s; was exposed to LISP in graduate school. I found LISP intriguing but very difficult to maintain. I used Forth once for an engineering (hardware) project, and I hated it. Awful.
I'd say this guy is out of his mind. Or is someone who knows little about statistics, e.g., how many tests for significance does R have vs. Python? Over 100 vs. two dozen or so for Python. Python is not a serious statistical tool. And R is going nowhere. Now if SAS, SPSS, etc. are ever made freely available, that could be a different story.
For me:
BASIC
6502 assembler
Forth
Pascal
FORTRAN
PL/1
COBOL
C
Perl
SQL
ASP.NET
I thought I was the only one that preferred Pascal.
Sadly. it dropped off of the map decades ago :p
See this page for why perl isn't really attractive to new programmers. The fact that the referenced perl script will actually work is proof enough that it was written by madmen.
No, you're not alone. I have (Delphi-compatible) Lazarus running on my laptops. I am a hammer waiting for a nail.
English will evolve. Read Beowulf in old English and you soon realise old English is basically German.
The English language is a creole that took bits and pieces of other languages.
It will evolve into Spanglish in the USA, and in to Hinglish, Singlish etc. Hopefully the future language will be a more precise language like Sanskrit or Latin.
"That's a joke son. A joke! Ya hear?"
Did you know that this forum was written in Perl?
Oops. How could I possibly have forgotten APL?
I helped doing a mod for a computer game several years ago.
I didn’t realize I was learning C+ and Visual Basic.
Newbie!
I use paper tape.
Commodore 64 Basic.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think JimRob wrote FR software with PERL
Viz. #45 & #49
* yeah I know but I see lots of folk saying it is a language so what the heck.
COBOL was way ahead of it's time and a highly under rated language.
I used to power up our department's Nova Computer - made by Data General Corp - each morning by using the switches on the panel. If a switch was up it was a 1; down was 0.
There was a boot program that was about 15 lines long and 8 bits wide that someone had printed out and taped on the front. (This is because "boot rom's" were either too expensive or hadn't been invented yet.)
So you set one row of 8 up/down switches to the starting address, which was always 00000000. The other row of switches was for the data. After setting all 8 bits, you hit a spring-loaded toggle switch to the right which dumped those 8 bits into location 0. And it had a really cool, very VERY modern feature whereby it would automatically take the next 8 bits you entered and put them in the current address plus 1 (00000001). So you didn't have to keep setting the address switches to 1, and then 2, ... etc, for each new line of the program as you entered it. Wow, is that a totally rad, time-saving convenience or WHAT?!?
Once you'd entered all 15 or so lines of the program, you'd insert a well-worn paper tape in the tape reader, and start the program you'd just entered at location 0 using the Run/Halt button.
The bitty 15 line program merely did a "read next 8 bits from the paper tape reader, store them in location X+Index, increment Index, repeat loop until end-of-tape condition, then jump to address X".
As I recall, the program on the paper tape contained mainly just H/W drivers for an 8" floppy drive and a Hazeltine 2000 terminal (monitor & keyboard in one package). After the drivers were loaded into the Nova, it would load yet more pieces of a rudimentary O/S off an 8" floppy, and then you could sit down at the Hazeltine, and - voila! - play blackjack or The Game of Life ("gliders" & "blinkers" & lots more) .... until someone showed up with real work to do.
Those were the days!
I used to wire panels for 407s, 514s,188s, etc., assembler on UNIVAC with Fastran II and RAMAC 305, assembler on B263 - later NEAT, Wordmark assembler on 1401. I’m not old, I’m ancient. All of the above by the age of 24. Did you ever work on clustered 370-165s and 168s? DEC VMS clustered 9886, 8666 (3) and 6860? Clustering winservers using nightwolf back in the early 90s along with tunneling access in the same period.
COBOL, Assembler and Fortran here.
All on 80 column punched cards.
Those Assembler decks of cards were huge.
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