Introduction


Anyone who has been around programmers or software engineers in person or online for long enough has heard the line: "X is finally dead." or "X will be dead in Y years." It seems to be a pastime of many to declare languages dead. But will these languages really be going anywhere?

The Doomsayers


I have heard people online many times say that a language is going to die. It seems that Java has been killed many times over and Oracle just hasn't realized it, or so many people online would say. Or students say that a language doesn't need to be learned, because it is no longer used in industry and is a dead language. Many of these claims are based off of pinhole views of what is and isn't used within different circumstances.

The Causes of "Death"


Many reasons are proposed for the death of a language, so let's take a look through a couple of them. First, many people see a statistic that says year over year usage of a language dropped on a specific platform or survey, or maybe just dropped a place to another language. The issue is that these data points are not wholly representative.  A lot of development is not shown in these either due to privatization or just lack of submission. Also a language falling a place could just be a small difference between the languages or they may fluctuate back and forth between years.

Second is the excuse that a language is never used anymore. This one is harder still to justify. Languages are hard to kill off completely. COBOL and Fortran are still used to drive many core systems that are relied upon heavily. They may not see much new development, but maintenance is still thriving. Now this may be a slow death, but to call these languages completely dead would be somewhat dismissive of these systems.

My favorite reason is to hear that a language is no longer used in development or that a language is so broken that it should never be used again. One of the main contenders in this category comes from students and seems to be constant chatter about C/C++. The issue with this claim is that there is still a lot of general development with these languages, in addition to development for embedded devices that strongly rely on C and C++.

The Life of a Language


Killing off a language is hard. Once it gains traction it continues to live on. Few companies want to redo their business applications every couple of years due to a slight shift in market share of a language. Core systems especially within finance especially do not want to do this due to the major investment in both the old system and the investment that would be required for a new system.

Languages that have grabbed a market share and have found a niche where the usage makes sense will not die or will take most of a professional's working career to truly die off. For example, for C or C++ to truly die off a massive shift within embedded platforms and many other systems, libraries, and frameworks would all need to happen. Until then, much of this code that even our operating systems and primary communications rely on will continue to be maintained and developed.

The caveat to all this would of course be if we see a massive shift in how computing works (ex. quantum computing). A massive shift that would be required to force this change could happen in the next 10-20 years for a mainline shift, but even then many systems may not move for quite a while.

Feedback


Thoughts? What are some of your favorite examples of claims of a language dying?