“A good programming language is conceptual thinking about programming.”
Probably these words of the famous American computer scientist Alan Perlis has led to the development of various programming languages. Programming has made sure that the computer functions as to what humans want it to perform, ever since the introduction of computers to the physical realm. You see programming is thus, so powerful to enhance the human-computer interaction in our day to day lives. And so, whatever that strikes the mind of the developer is turned into action by the enormous amount of intricately designed code that is written by them.
But, in this era of a dynamically changing environment, stability is not an option even with the programming languages. Regular updates, better plugin facilities, better environment to code in and definitely improvements can prove to be a golden ticket for some while can cost disparity in the usage of some other. The programming language that was once over-hyped, fails to please the developers as they find some better options and have no motivation left to work in it. Evolution and constant scope of improvements my friend is a big game-changer for programming languages too.
Here are some programming languages that are considered as an outdated programming language:
- Objective-C: An object-oriented programming language came into existence in 1984 that added messaging types small talks to C-language. It was the main programming l the design of IOS, macOS, IPadOS that was provided by Apple until they brought forward a revolutionary SWIFT in 2014. Swift was mainly developed and introduced for increasing the popularity of IOS apps among the Apple Users and increase the relative popularity of Application development among mobile app developers. Swift prevails to have an efficient throughput and has replaced Objective-C for nearly half a decade!
- CoffeeScript: This deliciously made programming language was used for compiling the javascript code that added syntactic sugar to the JS code in a practice to make it more transient in terms of time complexity and more robust and user-friendly. With the deployment of Javascript’s ES6 version, the dooming of this programming language came and the language that was most sought after at some period of time came to deprecation.
- Perl: Belonging to a family of two high-level languages, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language, PERL was developed in 1987 and was extensively used by developers working in Facebook. With the emerging competitors in the market like Python and Ruby, Perl lost its charm and the language which was once considered to be the top programming language lost the battle to these languages.
- LUA: LUA was a light-weight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language that was cross-platform because the interpreter of the compiled bytecode was written in ANSI-C and was mainly used for gaming and web server applications. Did you know the famous entertaining Angry bird was written in LUA? Yet it had to give up on its fate and since the introduction of R, LUA’s annexation came down or remained stagnant until falling completely!
- Rust: This language came up with the aim of replacing our classic C/C++ but it turned the other way around. Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language designed by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla research. Its popularity as per the survey conducted by Stack overflow remained towards the positive side, the critics started complaining about the ambiguous syntax and time complexity which was far from efficient. Restricting programmers of what they can or cannot use, Rust doesn’t have decent inheritance and exceptions, making it simple yet interfering with the availability of programming paradigms among the programmers. No doubt, Rust’s popularity started declining from the year 2018.
- Erlang: Erlang was a programming language that was developed for the purpose of instant messaging and telecommunications and it was also used in the development of the famous Whatsapp and facebook messenger. Strange that the language lost its fame!! Creation of Armstrong, Mike Williams and Robert Virding in 1986 while working in Ericcson Communication, the language did provide us with the two major methods of instant messaging and took social media to a new height, yet gave up with its popularity gradually decreasing as its utility was mainly constraint to the telecommunication industry.
“It was the best of all times, it was the worst of all times.” and so happened with these programming languages, they came, they prevailed and then they were succeeded by the advanced ones. The dynamics of popularity in the market doesn’t confine itself to fashion or music, rather Technology as well. Programming languages have also seen their raze! Ultimately, agility is the latest way of expressing ideas and making them stand-apart!
These languages might prove to be obsolete because of their declining popularity and better replacements, but they did conquer sometime back. But, since it is a progressing world and better versions keep on coming, leaving behind old, this post tries to give you a subtle idea of why these languages became outdated and how they were taken over by others! So, if you are planning to start your exploring the programming world, our suggestion would suggest you look for different parameters to build your application and strong foundation in any programming language and then decide the one you want to go ahead! At Coding Ninjas, we provide courses that are updated as per the latest industrial demands and provide you with a platform to stand out from the rest. We sincerely hope that our courses help you to be on the right track of success and be one of the Ninjas of Coding!
