SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019 –2020
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 195 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:04AM (5 children)
Tell them to stop trying to find people who already know it and train some who don't. You can have them producing useful work inside a week if they know any language that's somewhat similar. And you can pay them less than someone who already has some expertise.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:44AM (1 child)
While I totally agree with you, this attitude is long gone from the minds of the managers. Besides, it's too complicated for the brave new world.
The motto of Perl is TRMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It). That's what Larry wrote on my copy of The Book. Goggle switched to Python which is TIEOWTDI (There Is Exactly One Way To Do It), but even that is too complicated for Google engineers. They require a dumbed down Go.
For the better or worse, the world has changed.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:49AM
That's why they're middle management and will never be anything better. You do not get the brass ring if you don't take the risk and reach for it. Caution's fine but fear causes mediocrity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:07AM (2 children)
When you're hiring people, there is something to be said for being able to seek out skills for which there are plenty of candidates for.
On the flip side of that, you have to stand out to get hired.
So, for just one example, I know Visual FoxPro and was very good at it. A language lawyer. I mean I knew obscure corner details. But I don't expect to find a lot of demand for that obsolete skill. I also was once very good at Pascal, including inline or linked assembly.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday March 12 2020, @05:17PM (1 child)
In my opinion, FoxPro was a very good language/environment, which needed a bit of development. Microsoft bought it and intentionally broke in so that people would change to MSAccess. Which was profoundly inferior. Then they made the MSAccess environment so unstable that programs would run for awhile (as in periodically for months, with separate invocations), and then they would garbage the binary so you needed to reenter the source. (You didn't need to change it, but you needed to reenter it....I started saving working programs off as text files so I could do a copy/paste.) I can't guess why they did that, by guess would be incompetence, as I don't think it yielded them ANY value. Eventually I started writing routines that I could in Eiffel (well, and Eiffel dialect specialized for MSWindows), and those kept working. But they couldn't handle access to the database or screen display, only intermediate computations. (Which AccessBasic would, unpredictably, give the wrong results for.)
I started trying to avoid MS software because of that experience. I think this was around 1998. I know Linux didn't have a usable word processor.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday March 12 2020, @05:58PM
FoxPro ran on:
1. MS DOS
2. Unix
3. Classic Mac
4. Windows
Microsoft did away with the first two immediately, naming it Visual FoxPro.
Then after VFP 3, Microsoft did away with item 3 leaving only 4.
I did some cool things with VFP. And portable across Mac / Windows. Graphics. 7-segment LED displays in clocks and calculators. Those "Qix" like screen savers popular in the 90s. A 3D rotating box (just line segments, no shading) randomly changing rotation angles constantly and gradually so it wasn't repetitive. In pure VFP. No native code or Windows specific stuff. The tick was that you could put line segments and rectangle shapes onto a form (eg window). You could dynamically change their background color, and in the case of a line segment, change its endpoints. So 7-seg displays seem obvious, and the Qix like screen savers seem obvious. I also wrote HSV2RGB and vice versa conversions, so I could do lots of cool things with colors in VFP. Randomly color changing bouncing balls. A ball is just a circle whose color gradually changes hue, and changes position according to a velocity each frame, and bounces off the window edges. I also generated gradients. Simply draw a lot of segments where you vary either the hue, brightness or other attributes. Instant custom nice looking progress bars. It's just that aspbergers thing. Once I realized how far I could push some of the things available in VFP, I took it to the limits. Puzzle games, etc. None of these used any database, just used VFP as a language that could compile to an EXE. But then there were the boring business applications to write.
I did get into VB / Access for a short time before selecting Visual FoxPro. Cross platform turned out to be important for us. Alas, VFP became Windows only under Microsoft.
I never did learn the Windows GUI API the way I did the classic Mac. I just couldn't stomach Microsoft. And there was no need to write at that low level during this time period. Back in the 80's, the classic Mac, the Apple II, IBM PC, etc there was no off the shelf database like what we needed, so we had to build our own. We had files of records (analogous to DBF but not that format) and our own btree indexes (analogous to CDX but not that format). And it was cross platform using the UCSD p-System (Pascal) on Apple II, Apple III, MS-DOS and classic Mac.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.