Programming languages that are “finished”? | Hacker News Reader

Programming languages that are “finished”?

10 pointsATMLOTTOBEER19 comments

Are there any programming languages that are still under development but are not having new features added? I’m looking for something with a decent standard library and good tooling (or something that doesn’t require extensive tooling like scala, which is what I’m used to). A good way to manage dependencies is also a bonus.

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ANSI-C. I have C programs that I wrote in uni (many, many years ago) which still compile and run fine.

Then again, any language should meets your criteria. You don't have to use the new features.

My experience with MSTOICAL showed me that even C drifts over a decade or two. Reasonably standard code from 2002 required expert help in 2022 to get it to compile.

Unfortunately, this leads me to conclude that almost nothing is safe for the long term.

Elixir. Great tooling. Feature complete. Fantastic dependency management.

In that case, by proxy erlang too.

I'm pretty sure Elixir is looking to make some pretty significant changes to add some kind of static typing in the near future, so I definitely wouldn't put it in the "done" category.

Jose Valim said that the syntax won't change at all and if it has to change, he doesn't want Set theoretical types in the language.

Older Elixir would 100% backwards compatible and any type system (if there is one,) would be gradual.

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixi...

It's an optional feature.

Visual Basic. Microsoft will no longer develop it. It's still supported in .NET for the time being:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-p...

Visual Basic 6 applications are supported up to Windows 11 but the IDE is not:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

I have never touched Fortran, but my wife worked on 50 years old code for atmospheric physics / boundary layer modelling. I have no idea how stable it is, and my wife is not cs but a physicist, so wouldn't tell me, but I have a feeling that it's pretty mature.

What do US nukes use? Anyone?

PHP, despite its age, is actually pretty nice to work in these days. It's mature, well documented, has a good standard lib, and easy dependency management. It only really makes sense if you're doing web apps though.

Perl 5.

This barely sees updates except minor things and security patches, works great.

Common LISP?

I was going to say. It's Common Lisp, btw.

StandardML or maybe OCaml

The upcoming OCaml 5 is about to deliver the biggest new feature for a long time, and there are plenty more features in the pipeline, so I don't think it fits OP's spec at all.

Maybe Assembly? It will only change with cpu architecture.

Perl

html

If you include CSS, it's pretty far from done... they keep adding new things all the time.

But yeah HTML by itself is pretty fixed now and new stuff happens in CSS and JS.

Some can see a joke at first but think : today javascript framework vue/react (...) as replace plain old html in a way that viewing html source code in a pain and not relevant.

HTML and its purpose is dying.

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