Conversation

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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yeah, that makes sense. Once the business models that rely on the tech die the underlying tech stops being maintained. It's fascinating to see how early industrial tech played out e.g. when was the last steam locomotive used, the last time UK used canals for transporting goods
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