Programming languages that can become irrelevant in 10 years

Programming languages that can become irrelevant in 10 years – Altabel Group's Blog

Contemporary rapidly developing world doesn’t give us a chance to relax and live in a calm and stable atmosphere. Trends change, fashion moves away and returns, and all global processes are being constantly optimized. The changes also relate to the world of programming. Progress is unstoppable. New languages appear very often but only a few of them will become popular among developers. However, progress has a fly in the ointment – previous languages are becoming outdated. If a language does not retain its value over time, its users will choose a different one and it will disappear completely or become the basis for a new, better one. In this article, we have prepared a list of programming languages that may become unclaimed in 10 years.

Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic open source programming language with an emphasis on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is pleasant to read and easy to write.

Ruby was an instant hit when it was released in 1999 and programmers were impressed by how quickly an application could be built on it. Soon after, the Ruby on Rails framework was released and the language became a favorite of developers. 10 years of fame gave way to a less positive decade, and now Ruby is in the list of outsiders.

It is gradually slipping into TIOBE (programming community index). Moreover, last year a Dice job survey showed that companies have become much less likely to look for specialists with knowledge of Ruby. Burning Glass (real-time job market) predicts that the number of vacancies containing this language will have decreased by 8.1% by 2030.

What are the reasons? First of all, the speed. Applications written in it work much slower than in JavaScript, GO, and even Python. These languages appeared in accordance with the requirements of the time but Ruby is stuck in the past in many ways. For instance, the MVC architecture that made Ruby on Rails so popular at that time is now considered outdated and too complicated by many developers.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a third-generation event-driven programming language from Microsoft known for its Component Object Model (COM) programming model first released in 1991 and declared legacy during 2008.

Visual Basic for Applications, VBA, was at the hearing in 2004 but after 2009, the interest in it began to decrease. The PYPL rating (Popularity of Programming Language index) indicates that the popularity of VBA has fallen by 0.2%. If you look at the data on VBA that is available on Google Trends, it turns out that interest in VBA has been steadily falling since 2004. However, it can be noted that VBA, despite the decline in popularity feels not so bad in comparison with other disappearing languages.

There were not many people willing to write in VB and with the advent of C# in 2000, its relevancy became less and less. Many programmers switched from VB to C# as it is more concise, offers more functionality, and is better suited for developing cloud services and applications that are now in demand on the market. Moreover, it seems that the creators themselves put an end to it because Microsoft said that they do not plan to develop it further.

Haskell

Haskell is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Developed to be suitable for teaching, research and industrial application, Haskell has pioneered a number of advanced programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading.

Haskell is also one representative of “the old languages” that was created decades ago but was also used in the 21st century. Unfortunately, his time is quickly running out. Haskell is mainly used by researchers and scientists to write programs that perform complex transformations and extrapolations.

Haskell has a strong base of loyal fans, and the language itself has influenced many major projects and companies, including Facebook and GitHub. Anyway, in the long-term ratings of RedMonk, it shows quite negative forecast which indicates a decrease in interest in it among users of GitHub and Stack Overflow. It is quite difficult to learn, thus the number of active users is very small. The fact is worth mentioning that the last update was released in 2010. Its fate is obvious.