Comment by rramadass
5 hours ago
Both Fortran and COBOL will be here long after many of the current languages have disappeared. They are unique to their domains viz. Fortran for Scientific Computing and COBOL for Business Data Processing with a huge amount of installed code-base much of it for critical systems.
Don't know about COBOL, but FORTRAN and Ada definitely would survive an Extinction Level Event on earth.
Plenty of space based stuff running Ada and maybe some FORTRAN.
The key to understanding their longevity lies in the fact that they were the earliest high-level languages invented at a time when all software was built for serious long-lived stuff viz. Banking, Insurance, Finance, Simulations, Numerical Analysis, Embedded etc. Computing was strictly Science/Mathematics/Business and so a lot of very smart domain experts and programmers built systems to last from the ground up.
The computers themselves were also so expensive that most businesses did not buy them, they leased them.