Five Programming Languages That Are Probably Doomed

It&#x27;s a generational thing as well. New programmers adopt whatever is fashionable when they start out and move on from there. Ten years ago that would be Ruby and quite a few Ruby developers ended up in e.g. the Elixir and Rust communities. Five years ago that would have been Javascript. Today that would be Typescript and lots of Javascript developers would have progressed to that naturally (as well as Go, Rust, and a few other languages).<p>This is significant because the number of programmers world wide doubles every five years (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&#x2F;uncle-bob&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;MyLawn.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&#x2F;uncle-bob&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;MyLawn.html</a>). So whomever was doing perl 20-25 years ago is outnumbered 16-32 x by everyone else in the business before you even consider the vast numbers of former perl developers that threw in the towel a long time ago. This means most new projects will bias to whatever skills are available cheaply (i.e. whatever is popular) and many of the relatively few older developers end up adapting to that.<p>I actually know a couple of companies with some active perl code bases. Wouldn&#x27;t touch it myself since I was an early Java adopter (now using Kotlin) but they seem to manage. Though I imagine finding more developers is going to be tough. Languages never die but they do tend to become shadows of their former glory. I don&#x27;t think anyone would suggest using Cobol for a new project at this point in time. It&#x27;s been considered a legacy language for as long as I&#x27;ve been programming (since the late eighties). It&#x27;s dead as door nail; never coming back. But you can still make good money maintaining code written nearly half a century ago.

I would bet all five languages are still in common use in ten years. The language most likely to fade away though might be Objective C since Apple really is pushing Swift and new frameworks built with Swift.

R is going away??!?!? The tidyverse, Rstudio, and modern ecosystems like bioconductor have led to a huge boom in the use of R in life sciences, to the point that I teach more Python than R. I reckon R is now the language of choice if you are starting out in the life sciences&#x2F;biology. RLadies chapters are sprouting up like nobody&#x27;s business all over the world!<p>And they don&#x27;t even know about the big projects that connect R and Python, like Rstudio&#x27;s reticulate.

Their take on Haskell reminds me of &quot;Lisp doesn&#x27;t look any deader than usual to me.&quot; I&#x27;m a little surprised PureScript didn&#x27;t come up at all; that has intriguing potential to interop with Javascript and now also Go.