Comment by infradig
3 years ago
Prolog got half-way there last year. It will go the distance. C as well. Lisp of course. The reason is that they define their paradigm. C#, C++, Rust, Ruby, Java are neither fish nor fowl and will not make it. Python has become too useful not to survive. I started with Cobol and would happily dance on it's grave before I pass.
Come on, Java is so insanely big that it simply will go there from momentum alone.
Many says it is the new Fortran/Cobol, especially in finance but it has something special — the JVM. Plenty of old software continues to run on virtualized hardware simply because they depend on a given CPU architecture’s quirks and can’t be ported. The JVM is well-specified and thus any program programmed against it can run indefinitely, independent of hardware. Being cross-platform is also “vertical” in that past and future architectures can also be supported.
And on top of that, tell me any other platform with a specification of both language and runtime (where even data races are not completely UB) that has as many independent implementation, many of which are supported by FAANG companies and could be developed alone further if anything were to happen to the others? Like, Alibaba alone could continuously develop the platform.
If by C, you mean, descendants of C, I agree with you. If you mean C itself will survive, I strongly disagree.
I think with the recent focus on safety in languages, Rust and Ada, especially SPARK, will have better futures than C and C++. I think business is going to turn against C[++] for new projects, and there will be a push to rewrite C[++] code in safe languages, especially for operating systems, networking, and security code , making C[++] the next COBOL.
Since safety isn't something you can simply bolt onto a language, many other safe languages will crop up to replace the rest of the unsafe languages.