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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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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:29PM (15 children)
Lisp/clojure bares naked what programming languages are, especially those that come from procedural languages (most of us).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NickM on Wednesday March 11 2020, @11:00PM (3 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 3, Funny) by DutchUncle on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:10PM (1 child)
You can do that in Snobol too. And it makes more sense.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:39PM
I haven't seen or used Snobol in 50 years! They might have invented the term "spaghetti code" for Snobol, and you literally CAN'T program any other way. The last time I used it, it was thought of as SLOW!!! but flexible, and aimed at language processing. I guess "language" includes computer languages.
OTOH, I never used it that much. At that time my main language was FORTRAN IV with occasional dips into assembler. Arrays were all fixed length. And branches without line numbers hadn't hit the compilers. (Some UNIX people were using a preprocessor that accepted structured programs and output FORTRAN, but that FORTRAN was nearly unreadable.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by sorpigal on Friday March 13 2020, @12:20AM
If you're not metaprogramming you're barely programming, and few languages encourage that like lisp. I don't think lisp is dying (inasmuch as its popularity is hardly moving up or down right now) but it may be that there are enough languages out there which provide a large percentage of its power that it is no longer quite so essential to learn as it once may have been.
I still recommend people learn lisp even if they never expect to use it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday March 11 2020, @11:07PM
Lisp had a lot of potential, but it had the problem that until (I think it was) Steel Bank Common Lisp was released a compiler cost around $1500. By the time cheap compilers were around, other languages had built libraries and user groups.
That said, it had/has a few problems with variable access, etc. and a truly ugly naming convention. So even if the field were level it would be at a disadvantage. (Look into the way Lisp handles the names of variable within objects if you want a read stomach twister.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:02AM
I have a love for Lisps in general and Clojure in particular. I've never commercially used one however. I know that one of the things that helps Clojure is that it runs on the JVM and thus Clojure advocates can sell it to their bosses because it's compatible with Java. And it is.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday March 12 2020, @09:11AM (3 children)
Indeed if you are interested about programming, a book on a lisp dialect will save you time in the end. The syntax is easy to grasp (but it is not easy on the eye), and you don't have to study the bulk of common lisp, since elisp picolisp clojure and scheme are available.
For beginners, Pharo (smalltalk, think about it as java done right, almost three decades earlier) has a free online OO programming course with a dedicated environment. I have not tried the course but the environment is nice, it would be a killer production environment if they integrated db functionality in the same way they did with git (some projects float around about external db of object, not tried them though, it would be a killer to have picolisp style cross-image db functionality in smalltalk)
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:45PM (2 children)
Pharo doesn't handle concurrency well, and the last time I looked it handled Unicode via an external library. Not necessarily a problem, but quite possibly a source of incompatibilities. I was really looking at it's multi-processor capability, and when that turned up absent I stopped looking.
Smalltalk is one of those languages I've looked at repeatedly, and always decided it wasn't the right tool for the job. I'm not really sure what job it *is* the right tool for, but it looks so interesting it seems that there *MUST* be one. Some folks at MIT seem to agree, because their language "Scratch" is built in Squeak Smalltalk.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday March 12 2020, @10:04PM (1 child)
Probably smalltalk won't die until the last gemstone db is up. A pity they didn't open source it when java bet on open source. We'd be having a different business software landscape by now I think.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 13 2020, @03:52PM
IIUC there's a real problem with getting the underlying software engine to handle multiprocessors, so it may be a really basic design decision analogous to Python's GIL, but worse.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:44PM (1 child)
NO, Lisp and other functional programming languages are markedly different from the "most of us" procedural languages.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 12 2020, @05:42PM
The "most of us" procedural languages have adopted more and more of Lisp in the last 30 years.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday March 12 2020, @06:42PM
Ever use a Symbolics Lisp machine? It really is another world.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday March 14 2020, @02:17PM (1 child)
Lisp is thriving in the form of Scheme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @11:55AM
.. and PowerShell ...