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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-do-YOU-think dept.

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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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:56PM (4 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:56PM (#969909) Journal

    Objective-C is very interesting because it is a simple and elegant pure superset of C. It's what NextStep, OpenStep, GNUStep and the GUI of MacOS X were written in.

    Ten years ago I bought a book on Scala. It was a nice Object Oriented language for the JVM with functional programming features (lambda) and full access to all the existing Java classes. Never got around to writing any myself due to circumstances, but it seemed far more terse and expressive than Java.

    Perl is mad. It's worth looking at to see what an IQ of 200 and a lot of hubris, combined with contempt for us mortals can produce.

    LISP is a family of languages. You haven't lived until you've tasted curried functions. Have a look at scheme (nice and simple) and DrRacket. Then look at Clojure on the JVM.

    The Pascal family of languages are worth a look. I've written Pascal (Turbo) but I learned Modula-2 first in my teens. That taught me the importance of types and encapsulation.

    FORTH because just you must. Radio telescopes.

    Take some advice from Paul Graham and look for the best languages, not just the most popular. You have to be mindful of where your next salary payment is coming from but if you only aspire to be average, that's all you'll achieve. Look for the best. When you have the opportunity to use the best, use it, and beat the competition.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by melikamp on Wednesday March 11 2020, @11:22PM (1 child)

    by melikamp (1886) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @11:22PM (#969922) Journal
    LISP really should not be in this list. It is indeed a family. Some dialects have fallen by the wayside, granted, but Scheme is beautiful, useful, and being used all over the place.
    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:28PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:28PM (#970254) Journal
      How is Scheme doing relative to Lua and JavaScript? The latter two seem to be in most of the places where I'd have seen Scheme a decade ago. VS Code seems to be the new EMACS, just with TypeScript instead of Scheme...
      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:57PM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:57PM (#970268) Homepage Journal

    "Ten years ago I bought a book on Scala. It was a nice Object Oriented language for the JVM with functional programming features (lambda) and full access to all the existing Java classes. Never got around to writing any myself due to circumstances, but it seemed far more terse and expressive than Java."

    Exactly right. Scala is a really nice functional language. But functional languages and GUIs don't mix all that well, so having full compatibility with Java (and hence JavaFX), plus all the other Java libraries out there, was a really good move. I wrote several sample programs in Scala and quite enjoyed the experience.

    I'm not sure why Scala hasn't seen more interest. It would have been far nicer to use Scala where functional programming is needed, rather than introducing those horrible Java lambdas that pretend to be functional, but really aren't.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.