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Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019 –2020

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

DannyB wrote in with a submission which became:

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?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:09AM (1 child)

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:09AM (#970089)

    CoffeeScript has to do with Javascript. I remember it existing over 10 years ago, well before Javascript really exploded and it started evolving in a more standardized manner. These days, just use Ecmascript 2018 or whatever the latest version is, or TypeScript if you don't hate yourself.

    Scala is within my domain, and I can confidently say don't use it for production code. It can be fun to mess around in if you like type system logic puzzles, but it's underlying premise - mix pure functions with side effecting, exception throwing code in whatever way works for you - is fatally flawed. Maybe Dotty (Scala 3) will be better, but it's been coming for 8+ years now and it still isn't giving up this ludicrous idea that you can safely ignore runtime exceptions even when accepting first-class functions that have no meaningful way to prevent runtime exceptions. Also, most people don't like type system logic puzzles.

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 12 2020, @08:52AM

    by zocalo (302) on Thursday March 12 2020, @08:52AM (#970159)
    Yep, I looked it up before posting - that's what made me think I'd probably confused it up with Apple's Cocoa - bit of a "duh!" moment; Java is a kind of coffee and after that the "Script" part should have been obvious really. I suspect I probably had a better idea what CoffeeScript was 10 years ago, but it's not something I've ever used so things have definently got fuzzy since then, so I'm going to blame it on age.

    I've read a few articles on Scala, amongst lots of other niche/obscure languages since they feature in a monthly magazine I subscribe to, and while it sounds like it would absolutely have an appeal to certain types of coder I'm definitely not one of those any more. I was pretty good at low level coding in Assembly and C back in the day - including all those ugly hacks that would have people running for the hills screaming in terror these days - e.g. I'd have no problem with self-modifying assembly to squeeze all the code into a few KB or less - but these days my coding it limited mostly to hacking out a bit of script to fix some problem or automating some repetetive task.

    And probably still sending people running for the hills, screaming in terror... :)
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