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Programming mavens… are languages potentially immortal past a point of sophistication? Is there such a thing as “paradigm inadequacy” that dooms languages below that point to extinction? Eg: COBOL seems doomed, C and Lisp seem immortally plateaued, PHP is on dinosaur trial…
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Fortran is a good edge case. Afaict HPC still uses high-performance optimized old Fortran code (Linpack is still Fortran I believe?). But at some level this is almost hyperoptimized near-machine-code for core things like linear algebra, with no room for improvement anyway.
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This is a great insight. I’d phrase it as leakproof abstractions are immortal. Disruptors need a wedge between the silicon “market” and the incumbent code. Kinda fun to think of silicon as the market.
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Replying to @vgr
The key imo is impedance mismatch between problem and silicon capability. Zero mismatch between the reality of pointers and C. Near zero between Fortran and matrix math = future-proof auto vectorization. First language to hit zero mismatch for some domain lives forever.
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I don't know if it's sophistication — it's more once a certain number of critical systems are written in it, it's pretty much guaranteed to be running forever. I doubt COBOL will ever stop running something somewhere. Or do you mean extinction in the sense new projects stop?
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Well cobol today runs mainly on the few remaining finance and government mainframes right? As that hardware gets updated, I think applications will get rewritten in a new language whenever the strategic opportunity is right…? Or disrupt or comes in…
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C gets a lot more code written in it today than COBOL, but I don't see it as more immortal - COBOL will be running heavy loads through both our lifetimes. What does "doomed" mean in this context?
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maybe something about whether you can make a language that's better across ~ALL dimensions like you can make a language that's easier than C or safer than C or more portable than C, but not without trading something but still maybe someday, someone could come up w a C-killer
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