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Ilya Dudkin at Skywell Software has a story
Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019 –2020.
Each language gets a paragraph's treatment as to why he thinks these languages are dead or dying. Those languages are:
- Visual Basic
- Objective-C
- Perl
- COBOL
- CoffeeScript
- Scala
- Lisp
Do you agree with his assessment? Are there any other language(s) you would add to the list?
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Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019 –2020
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:25PM (10 children)
I remember almost 30 years ago when I had to write FORTRAN for my engineering curriculum, there was talk of the dying language COBOL over at the business school. The only context where I've heard it mentioned since then is as a punchline for jokes about obsolete computers. I had assumed it was already dead...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:29PM (8 children)
I believe a scary volume of financial transactions pass through COBOL code every day, still.
I think the year was 1983 when my Fortran teacher said "COBOL is dead, but will live forever due to the amount of installed code" - our local college had just removed the paper card punch terminals and replaced them with CRT terminals, but the system still had a 77 character per line maximum and also ran batches of cards for people who had established themselves as punchcard users.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:54AM
And all EFT systems. The format there is still punch cards too. Thought they talk about batch file :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:13AM (1 child)
According to my friend who gets the mid six figures coding COBOL in the financial industry, their LoCs are going up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @06:23AM
COBOL code that is 30+ years old still needs to be maintained. No one has a solution.
Mid 6 figures? so $400,000? High end contractor rates. Possible, and likely to happen.
They still employ permanent staff for $70K to $120K for permanent jobs maintaining COBOL systems in Australia.
Have a trawl through https://www.apsjobs.gov.au [apsjobs.gov.au] if you are interested.
Find the dept and teams and contact them directly. Services Australia, ATO and several other depts still have COBOL systems. Also check the banks. Commbank and StGeorge and Westpac and ANZ specifically.
They also need systems support people for these ancient systems. Mainframe ops, etc etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @08:20AM
You believe, and I know. I used to administrate these systems.
SAP / ABAP / Java tried to take over but failed.
There is no true successor for COBOL.
Feel free to invent one.
(Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Thursday March 12 2020, @06:38PM (1 child)
Why would it be scary? Does the age of the language have something to do with its usefulness? The fact that nothing better has replaced it in a half century should speak for itself.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 12 2020, @07:41PM
What's scary is that it is approaching "dead language" status. Thankfully, it's relatively simple and the basics can be learned quickly, but the larger structures and practices used are becoming a lost art. And, yet, millions of dollars per day flow through its pipes, like the Detroit water system in 2001 poisoning us in ways we are not yet aware of.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday March 14 2020, @02:14PM (1 child)
Wasn't it a 72-character limit instead of 77? The remaining 8 characters set aside for line numbers so you could mechanically sort the deck into order after dropping it downstairs be accident?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 14 2020, @04:47PM
That sounds familiar, though our CRT based systems may have gotten a 5 character bonus since there was no longer the danger of accidental shuffling.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Thursday March 12 2020, @06:34AM
COBOL is Undead!
If there was any more of it, it would be a Zombie apocalypse.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!