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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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