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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

I remember Perl 6 (now Raku) used to advertise itself as "the first 100 year programming language". I wonder if actually that could be Python. It seems like the update process has a lot of "taste", in that it adds features that are really useful and yet the syntax still looks clean and intuitive.

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"the first 100 year programming language" is definitely JavaScript. (If thinking in terms of Perl/Python like scripting and versatility, otherwise clearly C)

Depends on what you mean by "100-year language". If it's in the pg sense (i.e. a language that's on the main branch of the evolutionary path of programming languages) I think the answer is clearly the ML family.

If you mean "what language is most likely to be around in 2100 AD", realistically we'll have C for as long as we'll have computers.

Lisp has a 20 (25?) year head start; it's not more dead than usual.

I was thinking probably Cobol will be first since it has at least 63 years already but apparently LISP is technically a year older. Fortran is a year older but I'm not sure it will last as long as Cobol/Lisp (it's losing out to python for simplicity and is likely to bleed a lot to c/c++/rust for science libraries/things that require faster glue code)

SQL!

Between python, JavaScript, perl, c, c++, and Erlang... My money's on Erlang.

Note that Erlang has a two year head start on perl (and 5 on python), and Elixir has a hard Erlang dependency.

C 1972, C++ 1985, Erlang 1986, Perl 1988, Python 1991, JavaScript 1995.

C is half-way to 100: an amazing fact in the rapidly-changing world of technology. Of all these, Perl seems to have suffered the biggest loss of popularity so far, while Erlang has the least popularity to lose.

I'd be somewhat surprised if any of these are still in common use in 2072, but OTOH, I'd also be surprised if any of them were completely unused, with the possible exception of Perl.

Thinking about which languages might still be prevalent at the end of this century, Lisp and Prolog (in their respective niches) would be my candidates. Maybe also some form of C/C++, and Bash. Everything else I wouldn’t be so sure about. Languages whose typical software projects have a high turnover (like JavaScript) or are based on a virtual machine (JVM, CLR) are less likely to persist.

A C G T

Well, those are at most op-codes. The language is significantly more complex and everything is extremely context sensitive. Plus, it requires one hell of an interpreter to get it to work.

Then again, if we're comparing it to Perl 6/Raku...

The First gigayear-language.

Nah, elementary particles ftw

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