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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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No self-made man ever did such a good job that some woman didn't
want to make some alterations.
-- Kim Hubbard
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:00PM (2 children)
Perl isn't fading into the background, as much as the BSD's are in the background. It seems to me that Perl is a very big thing in OpenBSD. That's why I laughed when Joe said, "A lot of legacy code". Perl is on the front line for a great many people, including myself.
I'll admit, I don't know what this Perl 6 BS is actually about, but Perl 5 is perfectly adequate for modern tasks. Some pretty nice enterprise frameworks based on Perl like Catalyst, and there is Mojolicious (which I took to be Catalyst Light).
There's a lot of people using Perl for modern use cases with varying complexities and requirements. Not on legacy equipment, but cutting edge embedded systems. To say it's a dying language is amusing.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:30PM
Yup, at Intel in the hardware engineering groups, perl is the most commonly used scripting language with TCL being second since all the EDA tools have TCL parsers.
(Score: 1) by sorpigal on Friday March 13 2020, @12:15AM
First, Perl6 is now called Raku (renamed last year to hopefully end the confusion). Consider it to be a language riffing on Perl sensibilities, but for the modern age and the future. If there's a programming paradigm or language feature that has come out of academia in the last 30 years and is useful to anyone, Raku implements it--but it doesn't just throw everything in to a big pile and say "there you go." Instead, the designers seem to have looked at all of the different features out there and broken them down in to primitives that they then used to build up to every feature you could possibly imagine. The net effect of this is that everything works with everything else, and if you dig down far enough, much like the root system of a vast interconnected mushroom, everything is connected. The worst and best part of Raku is when you're trying to figure out how to do something and take a trip to the documentation, then wind up staring in to the abyss that is the depths that are available for you to plumb. I expect that this will, with time and experience, happen less often (but not, alas, for me as yet).
Perl5, or (now) just Perl, meanwhile has continued to evolve--and its evolution is accelerating. The primary reason, I think, for the loss of Perl popularity was that at a critical time in the explosion of the web (late 1999 to maybe about 2006) there was nearly zero work on the language. This is now dramatically better and improvements are being made regularly again, sometimes borrowing bits and pieces of the good ideas from Raku. If you haven't looked at Damian Conway's Dios.pm or his Regexp::Debugger, for example, you're missing out on modern Perl at its best.
Perl may not get the press any more, apart from unfortunate inclusions in articles like this, but it's an exciting time for the language... and for Raku, too.