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What programming language still in use today will die in the near future?

First of all I wanted to know that what death of a programming language means, and why it may happen?

For example, will C die one day in the future, Or it will remain a dominate programming language for some uses?

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will C die one day in future -- How would we know that? I though Lisp was dead until Clojure came along. Javascript was essentially dead until people started writing interactive web applications and jQuery came along. – Robert Harvey Oct 31 '12 at 18:31
A progamming language dies when the person who developed it shaves off their beard. :P – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner Oct 31 '12 at 20:53
I wish I knew. There are a few languages I would happily stake through the heart, decapitate, fill their mouths with garlic, and/or bury at a crossroads. – comingstorm Nov 2 '12 at 23:46

marked as duplicate by Robert Harvey, thorsten müller, World Engineer♦, Oded♦, Yannis Rizos♦ Oct 31 '12 at 19:37

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Programming languages don't die, they might become less relevant over time, they might adapt and evolve, but they don't die.

A few examples:

  • Assembly (1947) is still around, and still extremely relevant,
  • Fortran (1953) is still around,
  • Lisp (1958) is still around, in several forms and flavours, and it's fairly popular,
  • COBOL (1959) is still around,
  • BASIC (1964) is still around, but that's mostly Microsoft's fault,
  • SQL (1970) is still around and extremely popular.

Obviously, none of us can predict the future. But if Fortran is still around after almost 60 years, we can safely assume that C isn't going anywhere in the near future. Even extremely niche languages never really die, if they were useful once chances are that there's always be someone who'll use them in the future (or some variant of them), even if only for academic purposes.

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Programming languages don't die... they just get uploaded to that great Cray computer in the sky. – Robert Harvey Oct 31 '12 at 18:40
given that the C ABI is now the most used for interoperability for different languages' libraries I'm pretty sure it won't die – ratchet freak Oct 31 '12 at 18:43
The "BASIC" of today ain't your grandpa's BASIC. Thanks to VB and more to its .net cousin, it's grown up into a proper OO language and everything, and greatly restricted or eliminated the parts that made it such a horrible language in the olden days. – cHao Nov 6 '12 at 23:40

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