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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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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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or they'll stick it in a container and run it in Kubernetes github.com/IBM/kubernetes 😂 rewriting old software is really really hard as there's a million assumptions baked in that are almost impossible to understand if you didn't write it yourself
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so that leaves disruption... Facebook and WordPress won't get off PHP, but competitors built on something else might kill them and that might kill PHP? Ie if enough high-GDP things that rely on a language die, it dies...?
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