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The question refers to what programming language(s) still used today to build new stuff (anything from small to large projects) and not maintain legacy code. Why do you think it will die or become obsolete in the near future?

Considering that the lifespan of a language is considerably long, near future would have to be more then five, but probably not more then ten, years.

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Note: Cobol is also used for new code. We do. – user1249 Dec 5 '10 at 20:07
@Thor Edited, thanks – Maxtor Dec 5 '10 at 20:11
What does it mean for a programming language to "die" - just to be clear on the definition? – Rook Dec 5 '10 at 23:40
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Just like this question this is fundamentally unanswerable. – ChrisF♦ Dec 5 '10 at 23:45
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This looks like it's being asked backwards - shouldn't it instead say: "Which language today is used almost exclusively for maintenance, and not for any new, major code"? – blueberryfields Dec 11 '10 at 7:04
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closed as not constructive by ChrisF♦ Dec 28 '10 at 14:37

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10 Answers

up vote 43 down vote
+500

None

I don't think anything currently in use will die or become obsolete in the next five to ten years.

Languages Don't Die

Look at Lisp, COBOL, Perl, Fortran. These are old languages that still see use today. I don't believe a programing language ever stops being used or "dies" in that sense. It may not be under active development and improvement, but that should be seen as a sign of maturity and age rather then impending death.

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+1 Certainly the most likely answer and hopefully the one that will be born out. – Orbling Dec 5 '10 at 22:59
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+1 See COBOL. I wonder how often it has been declared dead, still even new code is written in it. – Oliver Weiler Dec 6 '10 at 0:36
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I think the word "obsolete" has different thresholds for most people. For instance, COBOL would not be the first language I would reach for to start a new project. Nor would it be in my list of "gotta check this out" languages. That said, there's probably a lot more I'm just ignorant about--so they aren't relevant to me in that sense. But there's an audience for everything. – Berin Loritsch Dec 6 '10 at 14:29
Including Perl in this list! How dare you! Why I never! – Mark Canlas Dec 16 '10 at 20:42
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@Mark: I don't understand. – Josh K Dec 16 '10 at 20:58
up vote 24 down vote

Visual Basic 6. There will be a day when a newer version of Windows will no longer support it.

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Windows 7 64-bit's first reaction to the VB6 installation cd was a big dialogue box telling me that Windows 7 didn't like this software. The day is not far away. – user1249 Dec 5 '10 at 21:36
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@Thorb: Was that the exact text? – Josh K Dec 5 '10 at 22:09
@Josh, no, very roughly from memory. I didn't copy it down. – user1249 Dec 5 '10 at 22:29
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Is it fair to state VB6 as separate from VB.Net? – Orbling Dec 5 '10 at 22:57
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@Orbling: VB6 and VB.NET are completely different languages. They share a similar name and syntax, but they are fundamentally quite different. I don't think VB6 is going to die, any time soon... there is still so much software still in use that was built with it. – Dean Harding Dec 6 '10 at 5:39
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up vote 11 down vote

From the way Oracle's been behaving lately, it sure looks like the future of Java is up in the air...

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can you explain more please ? – M.H Dec 5 '10 at 20:29
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Regardless of what Oracle is doing, Java is far too widespread now to just disappear in any short amount of time. – Peter Alexander Dec 5 '10 at 20:52
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Even though you may not personally appreciate their business or technology, Oracle has historically been an extremely bad choice to bet against. – NickC Dec 5 '10 at 21:31
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@Berin what are you suggesting could make it expensive to develop Java? See programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6352/… – NickC Dec 6 '10 at 17:14
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More specifically, to deploy a Java application. Already there are rumblings of a "premium" runtime that Oracle is preparing. In order to get the right performance, enterprises will need to pony up Oracle prices for the runtime. blogs.oracle.com/henrik/2010/11/oracles_jvm_strategy.html although the original article that started the mess is theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms – Berin Loritsch Dec 6 '10 at 18:21
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up vote 5 down vote

There's a very interesting SO post from Jon Harrop predicting the demise of OCaml and Haskell, crushed by the widespread availability of F#.

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I'd give this credence perhaps if F# wasn't such a newbie. I mean, 8 years old? Haskell's survived 20 already, and OCaml's not that far behind. – Frank Shearar Dec 5 '10 at 21:11
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Haskell has never been a mainstream language and never will be. It simply doesn't fit most programmer's minds. I say this as someone who has written useful programs using it. – Larry Coleman Dec 5 '10 at 21:20
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@Larry, don't you think it could be taught? – user1249 Dec 5 '10 at 21:37
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@Orbling: A "programmer" is someone who programs computers. Part of Haskell's problem is that it pretends you're not programming a computer, but instead writing a really big function that changes the world, that just happens to be executed by a computer. – Mason Wheeler Dec 6 '10 at 5:02
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@Frank: I'd give the post some credence if F# were actually better than Haskell. A modern compiled language that can't handle forward references correctly is an epic fail in my book. – Larry Coleman Dec 6 '10 at 10:46
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up vote 2 down vote

MMIX

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMIX).

Since Donald Knuth is the only one who uses this language, and he has already reached the age of 72, I think it is not unlikely MMIX will "die" in the near future.

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Well, I know at least four universities that use MMIX as a modell processor to teach assembly. – FUZxxl Nov 6 '11 at 12:20
up vote 1 down vote

I suspect M4 might be soon counting it's days, at least for build configuration. Projects like CMake and SCons are overtaking it, and people who have never been exposed to a language that strongly resembles LISP are more and more intimidated by M4 considering that there are alternatives.

Note, that might not obsolete M4, It is a useful tool in many areas.. but I predict that we'll see it fall out of favor in the next 10 years when it comes to build configuration.

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up vote 0 down vote

VB

Visual Basic (aka Classic VB, [!VB.NET]) is probably still in use (you can still find old win32 apps) Yet perhaps its the end of it.

VBA in its current form would just follow as MS Office would not have VBA engine included.

VBScript, even microsoft.com is no longer uses it rather use standard javascript. So there are some sysadmins who have a bunch of vbscript used to maintain their servers, but perhaps this is all obscure and left-field.

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up vote 0 down vote

I agree with the sentiment expressed above, that "languages don't die." They may become steadily more and more niche, but I'd bet money that if you look hard enough, you can find new development being done in COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, APL, and all sorts of stuff that you'd think would be dead by now.

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up vote -2 down vote

x86 and most other assembly language =)

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Have you ever used a compiler??? – Tim Post♦ Dec 11 '10 at 15:10
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So you believe the archaic x86 architecture will last forever then? Assembly languages are processor specific so they come and go very quickly. Even the assembly for the x86 family used today is not 8086 assembly anymore, and so on. Try generating Pentium I assembly and you'll find out that most compilers can't do that only 15 years after that architecture went public and even MMX,SSE/3DNow! extensions are considered dead technology. – Trinidad Dec 13 '10 at 12:58
up vote -4 down vote

HTML4 should eventually go away replaced by XHTML and HTML5.

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I wouldn't say that HTML is a programming language. – gablin Dec 5 '10 at 21:07
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Not to mention that I can't see HTML4 dying since 90% of people using HTML don't know the difference. And AFAIK most of the differences are additions, so I guess you could really only say HTML4 would be dead when every page is served with an HTML5 doctype. – NickC Dec 5 '10 at 21:34
Definitely programming languages. A better case could be made for XHTML, actually, but I think they'll all last a long time. It would be hard to make a browser that didn't support some rudimentary functionality for these "old" versions. – Kevin Cantu Dec 6 '10 at 0:13
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@Kevin Cantu did you mean to say "definitely not programming languages"? because it's not a programming language; it's a markup language (Hyper Text Markup Language.) HTML has no variables or methods. It can't perform any sort of operations, mathematical or otherwise. It's essentially just a set of labels for labeling content. (but anyway, yea, they'll both be around for at least another 5-10 years, especially since html5 isn't even final yet.) – robertpateii Dec 6 '10 at 1:03
HTML 3.2 still works. – David Thornley Dec 6 '10 at 20:25

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