a thing most of these have in common is that they're proprietary, so the users are dependent on the companies that own them for enhancements, bug fixes, and ports to new platforms. this is a recipe for wasting your time<p>visual basic, asp, coldfusion, foxpro, activex, flash, and silverlight, windows ce, asp.net, webforms? proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, and proprietary<p>and mostly pretty dead as a result<p>how about the non-proprietary things in the list? html, css, js, fortran, java, ruby, and rails are all just about as alive as they were 10 or 20 years ago, if not more so, except that rails didn't exist then<p>the exceptions are perl, objective-c, and the js frameworks. perl, ember, and backbone aren't going to disappear anytime soon but they will likely continue to stagnate. but unlike silverlight or windows ce, you can probably run your perl and backbone and angular and react and swift code 10 or 20 or 30 years from now on whatever platform people like then<p>unless the platform is centrally controlled by an owner who forbids it, so try to avoid platforms like that<p>(java applets were already dead 20 years ago, and soap sucked from the beginning, so these examples are out of place)<p>there <i>is</i> certain knowledge with a very limited half-life. but hopefully you aren't spending most of your time learning react apis or wasm instructions or editor keystrokes or chromium bugs, but rather general principles that transfer across domains. algorithms, reasoning, type theory, math, writing skills, hierarchical decomposition, scientific debugging, generative testing, heuristic search, that kind of thing. a lot of that stuff goes back before computing<p>and most code has an even shorter lifespan than the knowledge we use to build it. which is as it should be: most code is written to solve a problem that won't last decades or even years, but it's still profitable for companies to have it written. modifying a big system is harder than modifying a small one, so it's better to maintain just the code you need for today's problems. writing code and throwing it away is mostly fine<p>still, i've spent my career on free-software tools, and their half-life seems to be a lot longer, about 25 years. i reviewed some of the stuff i'm using right now in a comment on here 10 days ago, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829663" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829663</a><p>i know a guy whose preferred programming editor is ex. the non-full-screen version of vi