Pretty likely that’s the case with COBOL, definitely Algol, PL/1, Pascal, and Prolog.
Though uncommon or domain specific, not the case with APL (well J), Common Lisp, Forth, or Haskell.
I think there’s more new code being written in FORTRAN these days than in those last four combined.
Given that humans don't have anything resembling well-defined knowledge I'm somewhat confused why this keeps coming up as something desirable.
Numpy took inspiration from Fortran and MATLAB. Most scientific computing libraries use Lapack and BLAS libraries under the hood (which were written in Fortran).
Honestly, I think if Fortran had a few intuitive higher order abstractions/libraries - one wouldn’t need to mess around with C++. And now thinking more about it - it would be very cool to have a Numpy to Fortran transpiler.
COBOL and PL/I are still pretty alive for anyone working today on IBM and Unisys mainframes and microcomputers, regardless of bug fixes or new features.
Are they alive by gumby's definition of alive? Is anyone beginning new codebases in COBOL or PL/I, even on mainframes?
Brown field development moves much more consulting money per year than green field development.
There might be stuff written COBOL, except they're never gonna share it with you, cause its far too important to the fight over the $100 trillion stock markets.
On the other side... not sure how many newbies learn Pascal these days, though.
You also wouldn't call the newer invented languages like Esperanto dead, and yet there's more people who know and can speak Latin (using one of the modern pronunciations)...
Dead languages aren't those who aren't being spoken or used anymore, it's those that have no native speakers. It's not something that's in any way compatible with programming languages.
For a second there I thought we were still talking about Pascal! I'd wager it should be...
They had a major release to their most popular IDE just a few weeks ago[2].
A lot of these projects built with FP aren't as visible in the HN community, because they related to different hobbyist fields, aren't keystone components in the startup ecosystem etc. But they for sure exist.
[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/activity [1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/activity [2] https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,65631.0...
I personally know and like Fortran in its modern form, at least within its little niche. But the ability to maintain these codes long term is really important and it's tough to see that being viable with the supply of professional-level developers withering to nothing.
Hell my sister (print sales) joined a new firm and she had to spend six weeks in an intense classroom style training program the company ran to get new staff prepared for the nuances of their product.
It seems straightforward to setup a Fortran internal bootcamp for experienced developers at these massive legacy institutions, worth the upfront investment...no?
Of course you could make the case for even more modern languages like Rust etc as well, but the national labs are still on the conservative side when making decisions for their big projects. C++ does hit a nice sweet spot in terms of performance, features, and longevity despite the warts.
If you go into such a bootcamp as a fresh grad, you basically pigeonhole yourself into working in that niche forever. You would have a massive setback when switching jobs compared to taking a bogstandard Java job or whatever.
You're also wrong about the setback and being stuck in that niche. Once you learn the first language, more likely than not you'll have opportunities to continue to grow and develop in the role and learn new things. Most people are pretty adaptable.
It pains me to call CommonLisp obscure or uncommon because I used it heavily for a long time, but that’s the tough truth. It’s funny to think that one major criticism at the time was “its standard library is too massive” and now “its standard library is too small”.
I don’t remember anyone even thinking such a thing about Fortran, perhaps because standard library didn’t really mean anything for Fortran and because there have been tons of 3P Fortran libraries in the PD since before I was born.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS? AN APOSTROPHE IS MISSING.Pascal has its niceties, especially enabling one-pass compilation and pretty clear code. It's neither overcomplicated like Ada nor relatively unknown like Modula-3.
Perl is seeing a strong decline and I think it will join the dead group in a few decades.
A shame - I much prefer its take on a versatile, unixy scripting language.
Much has been done to keep it alive - the comprehensive book Modern Perl, and the well-integrated Mojolicious web framework. But it doesn't seem to be enough. I'm the only one in my circles and age range who knows it, everyone else would reach for Python, shell or even JavaScript.
The rise of Go as a sysadmin/devops tools language has also probably hurt Perl quite a bit.
These days, (the more friendly) Linux desktop distributions are about as easy to install as Windows; about as easy to use as Windows; and about as maintainable by a novice user as Windows.
Unless you're referring to Android/Linux or ChromeOS/Linux, instead of GNU/Linux.
It's way better than in the 2000s when I started to use Linux.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Yes it may take more effort to rewrite it natively now into whichever language the latex compiler is written in otherwise, the real braindead decision was not starting out that way. I mean shit, a modern equivalent would be of having to install python to use rustc or something.
It is everywhere. About the only case where you’d need that is on Windows but then if you are installing LaTeX on Windows getting Perl is a tiny bit of the complexity of the whole thing.
> A site must be up to host downloads for this prehistoric thing, and those binaries must be built, tested, and kept up to date by someone who might one day just vanish once they become bored of thanklessly maintaining a holy relic.
It’s not any more prehistoric than emacs, bash, or GCC; its latest version was published about a month ago. The CPAN is perfectly able to handle downloads. And it’s going to be in the repositories of all Linux distributions for the foreseeable future, considering how many tools depend on it. It is under active development; I don’t know where you got the idea that it was one guy in his basement doing it.
> Yes it may take more effort to rewrite it natively now into whichever language the latex compiler is written in otherwise, the real braindead decision was not starting out that way.
The real braindead decision is to jump on every language du jour just because. There is an optimum and I am sure at some point it will get rewritten in something else (see lualatex for example), but we cannot rewrite everything that works from the ground up every time a new shiny language shows up. Latex does not rust but I am sure at some point someone will find a clever pun and there’ll be a Show HN about it. In the meantime raging because a bit of software use some random language is not very productive or helpful.
> I mean shit, a modern equivalent would be of having to install python to use rustc or something.
From my experience rustc is not easier to install on Windows than Perl. On Linux it does not matter as everything is in the repos anyway.
(My guess is that people don't normally compile latex locally these days -- they do that on Overleaf -- and those who do use are old-school, hardcore users and they either use Linux or Mac)
I can't see why is ridiculous if it works
Perl like all the other languages that are heavily used aren't going to be going anywhere. They're used in legacy code. However, the original comment had a definition. Which says nobody would use it to start a new project. Talking about currently maintained projects doesn't really change the fact it doesn't seem anyone is using it for new projects.
> I think the meaningful definition of “dead language” is “nobody will begin a new code base in it any more, except as a hobby or research project”.