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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

What do you consider as "fad languages"?

Not going to start a flame war. Everyone has their opinions, However there are languages that come and go, and then are swift to become popular, but then are left to rust, because people stopped having smalltalk about them.

> languageS that Come and go, And then are swift to become popuLar, but then Are

> languageS Come And popuLar Are

> S C A L A

Did I do that right?

I think you hit that Node, with a ruby of a pun, and are on the right railroad tracks my friend.

Whitespace?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...

Yes, he's certainly Going Forth.

;)

That's a brainfuck

Despite the puns, as long as people start building production systems with those languages, they're going to stick around.

And several of those languages are probably used by 10x or more people than D is.

Luckily, there are so many things to build and so many programmers out there that almost any languages gets a spot under the sun these days.

When was the last time a programming language died out? My guess the last one was a language tied to its hardware...

Coffeescript is essentially dead, many production web sites were written in it.

For what definition of dead? Sure, not so many use it for new projects, but it is still being maintained. There is an upcoming major release which will output ES2015.

I've got some tens of libraries/apps written in CS, no plans to migrate them. Works as well today as it did 3 years ago.

> For what definition of dead?

It's at 71.0% (5th from top) on the Dreaded tab here:

http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2016#technology-mos...

> I've got some tens of libraries/apps written in CS, no plans to migrate them. Works as well today as it did 3 years ago.

You might have a different view to the above then. Sounds like you're using it for the kinds of things it's good for, perhaps. (Languages can fall into vogue and (infuriatingly) go viral for all the wrong reasons... with everyone fighting it and not understanding why)

Heh, that's kind of funny. If that's the main criteria for "death", then Coffeescript is in good company. Except for Visual Basic, which is basically a cockroach refusing to be killed by Microsoft, everything else is alive and vibrant.

Possibly horrible by geek purity standards, but waaaaaay more used than D :)

Not sure I'm using it for anything special... But one reason I chose it is my preference for minimal syntax, which is not a fashion thing and has not changed since I did Python 8 years ago. It also fixes some bugs in JS, like defaulting to globals on omitted `var` or implicit conversions on `!=`.

I do wish to have gradual static typechecking available though. This may unfortunately force me over to TypeScript or ES2015+Flow.

I think it says a lot that the only top 5 in the "Loved" tab that's also present on the whole "Wanted" tab is Swift. Not that I use Swift, but it's the one with a mainstream use case today pretty much. It will be interesting to see how it looks in 5 years.

Go is not going anywhere.

Unfortune, isn't it? We have D, Swift, Rust, Kotlin. Go looks very sad (and borderline ridiculous) compared to these.

Practically? How so?

In trying to group those together, the best my brain has been able to come up with is a raspberry-flavored pretzel.

I'm... slightly confused. :/

I agree except the swift part (I don't even code in Swift). It's impossible for it to die because of iOS unless Apple kills it for something else.

To paraphrase: On a long-enough timescale all languages are fads.

The ultimate power that can actually be manifested in physical reality (as far as we know) is still Turing Machines[1]... the rest is mostly ergonomics.

[1] Well, QM may add a "little bit" of efficiency, but it doesn't add any oracular power, per se. AFAIUI, at least.

FORTRAN users beg to differ. The horse they backed will be here until the lights go out because it probably is used to power the lights at some level.

Yes it most certainly is. All the power system applications written in the 60's and 70's were done so in Fortran as they had to be fast and run numerical analysis on massive matrices. However, a lot of it is being rewritten in more modern languages like C++ or C depending on the application.

> However, a lot of it is being rewritten in more modern languages like C++ or C depending on the application.

And a lot of it is embedding FORTRAN or COBOL in the new pretty C/++.

New skin, same system.

> numerical analysis on massive matrices. However, a lot of it is being rewritten

In Julia, too.

Probably some, but in the industry I'm referring to, nobody is going to let you write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language. Options are Fortran, C, C++, or Java. Julia is cool, but still really new in the cosmic scale.

> nobody is going to let you write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language.

Whose permission do you seek who will "let you" or not "let you" write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language? What if you work for yourself or are creating a startup?

Obviously a startup with no history is a totally different context. The parent commentator did mention "industries". Power in particular (think nuclear power especially!) are... necessarily conservative.

I was surprised to learn that Blackrock uses Julia.

https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/blackrock.html

Ha! I can't say I've ever programmed in Fortran[1], but surely it too will perish... eventually. Idle meta-thought: It's actually kind of interesting how hard it is to replace "legacy" in programming... I wonder if there's something we could/should be doing to make it easier to do on a large scale?

[1] I think it's spelled that way these days, but of course given the context of the thread, maybe you're talking about old-school FORTRAN.

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