Programming languages are a crucial medium of connecting humans to machines. The world is moving toward the most advanced technologies, and this is only possible because of programming languages. These languages help in harnessing the power of computing in all human endeavour.
However, in this article, we list down seven programming languages, in no particular order, which people think will die in a few years.
Ada
Ada or Augusta Ada Lovelace is one of the oldest languages. It is a statically typed and an object-oriented high-level programming language, which has built-in support for explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, and other such. The features of this language include strongly typed, modular, object-oriented, expressible, readable, etc. However, this language can be said to be dying out since the most recent version of the language standard is Ada 2012, which was updated around four years ago.
C
C is one of the popular programming languages which is used to develop system applications that form a huge portion of operating systems such as Windows, UNIX and Linux. According to the Tiobe Index March 2020 report, this language has gained the 2nd position among the top 50 languages. However, organisations who are using C language as their core, such as Microsoft have been thinking of dumping this language and moving on to other popular languages.
The tech giant has been facing issues with C and C++ for a while now and spends an estimate of $150,000 per issue as a whole to solve the issues and vulnerabilities. One thing is for sure that C is not going to die soon since this is a de-facto programming language for almost all organisations, and altering it from the core is merely impossible.
Haskell
Haskell is a general-purpose, statically typed programming language. According to the Tiobe Programming Language Index for March 2020 report, Haskell has scored 39th position out of 50 programming languages. This language provides several intuitive features such as shorter and maintainable code, higher reliability, shorter lead times, etc. However, Haskell is a difficult language and consumes time to learn, and the latest stable release was announced nine years ago. With the ever-changing technology, there are several newer languages, compared to Haskell such as Go, Python, which are gaining more traction than the former.
LISP
One of the old languages, LISP, has lost its fame and started its journey to death. The language is being rarely used by developers these days. LISP is a language of fully parenthesised prefix notation and is the second oldest high-level programming language, developed in 1960. These days, developers do not use LISP directly, but they use general-purpose Lisp standalone implementations such as Clojure, Common Lisp and Scheme.
Objective-C
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language which serves as the primary programming language for tech giant Apple for macOS and iOS. According to the Tiobe programming language popularity charts, Apple will be replacing their favourite old language with Swift in the coming years. In a report, the tech giant explained that Swift is the successor to both the C and Objective-C languages since it provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics, giving Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers the performance and power they demand.
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose programming language which includes Perl 5 and the latest sister version is the Perl 6, also known as Raku. This language is used for several tasks including web development, text manipulation, network programming and other such. The latest stable release of this language was a few months ago, but according to a few developers, this language will be dying soon. The reason behind this is the early version of Perl, which is somewhat difficult to load and by the time Perl’s sister version got released, the other programming languages such as Python, Ruby, etc. have matured a lot and gained the traction from the developers.
R
R is a popular programming language for statistical computing. It provides a wide variety of statistical such as linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, and graphical techniques, and is also highly extensible. However, many a time, this language has been compared to Python, and some developers even think that this language will soon be doomed due to the popularity of Python.
One must actually understand that Python is a general-purpose scripting language, while R has the strength of the statistics packages. Python is suited for data manipulation, munging and other repetitive tasks, while R suits best for exploring datasets and analysis. According to the Tiobe Index Programming Language Community Match 2020 report, R has secured the 11th position out of 50 from 14th position in the last year.
Wrapping Up
There is always a debate in using programming languages between those who love these languages and those who have stopped using them. The point here is that languages never die; they evolve. With ever-evolving technology, many programming languages will emerge in every decade according to the need of that particular time.
