Programming Languages Marked for Death

 Programming Languages Marked for Death

As developers embrace new programming languages, older languages can go one of two ways: stay in use, despite fading popularity, or die out completely. We predict the following languages will likely die:

ALGOL

Short for Algorithmic Language, ALGOL is one of the earliest dead programming languages. It had three major specifications: ALGOL 58 (1958), ALGOL 60 (1960) and ALGOL 68 (1968). The last of these was not well received.

ALGOL is the predecessor to many other now dead programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL and…

COBOL

COBOL was created by The COSADYL Committee in 1960. The name COBOL is an acronym for ‘Common Business-Oriented Language’, and (as the name suggests) it was designed primarily for business use.

The jury is still out on whether COBOL is one of the dead programming languages or not. This is because it lives on in quite a few legacy systems that are expensive to update.

Ada

Like COBOL, Ada is a mostly-dead programming language that lives on in legacy systems. The language aimed to replace the hundreds of languages used by the US Department of Defence.

Ada, though complex and ambitious, is still used for some critical systems, alongside a minority of projects or functions. But it is gradually fading out of the limelight in favour of more modern languages.

Perl

Perl is a language that’s been on and off its deathbed for years now. Work on Perl 6 started in 2000 and was in development for 15 years, finally being released in December 2015.

During this time, many named Perl amongst the other dead programming languages that had fallen out of favour. The release of Perl 6 did revive the language somewhat, but it’s far less mainstream than it once was.

 …Pascal

Descended from ALGOL 60, Pascal is the creation of Niklaus Wirth.  It’s named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who invented the first mechanical calculator.

Pascal (the language) led to the creation of Delphi. Delphi soon took the place of Pascal, condemning it to the list of dead programming languages.

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