It’s easy to predict a programming language’s seemingly imminent demise. When Apple rolled out Swift in 2014, for example, some analysts believed that it would quickly eat into the market-share of its predecessor, Objective-C. But languages have a funny way of hanging on, often powered by clusters of hardcore users and legacy applications.
In the past, we’ve used a variety of sources (including Stack Overflow data, the language-popularity rankings published by TIOBE and RedMonk, and Dice’s own data) to predict which programming languages are doomed in the medium- to long-term. But that feels a bit morbid, so now we’re going to focus on something else: Which languages continue to hold on, despite constant predictions that they’re headed for the dustbin of dead tech.
Objective-C
As we mentioned above, when Apple executives took to the stage six years ago to unveil Swift, its new-and-improved language for building macOS and iOS apps, many predicted that usage of Objective-C would soon wither away. At the time, it seemed like an easy prediction to make: Apple’s Objective-C is 35 years old, with all the baggage that comes with that.
But a funny thing happened: Objective-C refused to die. Over the past few years, it managed to maintain a fairly high position on programming-language rankings such as RedMonk and TIOBE (your personal mileage with those lists and their methodology may vary, of course), although it’s dropped somewhat in recent months.
What’s behind this unexpected longevity? A couple decades’ worth of legacy code to maintain and manage is a big part of that. Simply put, it takes resources and time to rewrite and update an app. In addition, many developers simply prefer to work with a language they’ve always used.
Eventually, usage of Objective-C may tumble to nothing, but that might take far longer than anyone thought. In the meantime, if you’re interested in building iOS and macOS apps, and you haven’t yet learned Swift, check out our short tutorials on functions, loops, sets, arrays, strings, structs and classes.
R
For years, it seemed as if R, a programming language heavily utilized by data analysts and academics, might be done for. The culprit? Python, which has become increasingly popular in a variety of niche programming contexts, including data analytics and machine learning. Two years ago, for example, a survey from Burtch Works revealed that Python use among analytics professionals grew from 53 percent to 69 percent, even as the R user-base shrunk by nearly a third.
But R might be enjoying something of a comeback. The latest TIOBE Index rankings show R jumping into eighth place, up from 20th a year ago. Of course, TIOBE isn’t the definitive indicator of a language’s use, but other rankings (such as Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey, specifically its ‘Most Loved’ language rankings) also show R hanging on.
R is niche; it’ll never challenge the likes of Python and JavaScript as a generalist language. However, it seems like a sizable cluster of specialists and fans could keep R viable for quite some time into the future.
COBOL
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the nation into lockdown (and workers into self-quarantine), state governments began pleading for COBOL experts. The reason was simple: These local municipalities had never shifted their databases from mainframes onto more modern systems, and they needed technologists skilled in COBOL to deal with unexpected spikes in usage.
For example, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy asked for volunteers who could program in COBOL to help the state deal with a 1,600-percent increase in unemployment claims.
The crisis has highlighted how governments, along with major institutions such as banks, still rely on COBOL for some of their core systems. Moreover, demand for the programming language won’t slacken soon: Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country, has predicted that positions demanding COBOL skills will “only” decline 13.6 percent over the next decade. Not bad for a language that’s 61 years old.
In other words, COBOL won’t be around forever. But claims that it’s a “dead” language are very premature. In the meantime, those who specialize in COBOL-related jobs can earn more than $115,000 per year, according to Burning Glass’s analysis.
PHP
Every few quarters, it seems there’s yet another article about how PHP is in a death spiral. Last year, for example, TIOBE declared yet again that the 25-year-old language was doomed—for real, this time! “Till the end of 2009 everything went fine, but soon after that PHP was going downhill from 10 percent to 5 percent market share in 2 years’ time. In 2014 it halved again to 2.5 percent,” it noted.
Critics have spent a lot of time lambasting PHP. “A fractal of bad design,” as one blog infamously termed it. Some 62.7 percent of developers, meanwhile, told Stack Overflow that they “dreaded” using PHP, which really isn’t good.
Despite all that, however, PHP continues to linger in a pretty high-up position on TIOBE’s own Index, as well as the RedMonk rankings; and as with Objective-C, PHP is used in so many legacy applications, at so many major companies such as Facebook, that it’s clearly not going away anytime soon. Reports of its imminent demise might just be wishful thinking on the part of many technologists.
