Posted on 04/06/2023 6:35:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
1. Java is the de facto enterprise standard. Having worked in some large enterprises, I know they are absolutely resistant to quick change and will keep Java for decades, like they did with COBOL. Java comes with enterprise and team features that other languages envy.
2. Javascript: depends on Web Assembly and transpilers. Even today, you can write in PHP and transpile in Javascript. It could become “the new JVM”, that is something that gets less used over time but everything use it as intermediate codebase. A big issue with Javascript is that if you exploit its strengths (ease of use, small code, available in browsers) you end in compatibility issues and you’ll need tools and more tools. I know I am in the minority thinking what I am about to say, but I think jQuery has been the most “Javascript soul” library ever created. What came next, are “frameworks” and “language improvements” that take out JS nature and make it another thing. Make it a “regular language”. Add burden and intermediate passages. Look at the ever growing tools chain needed to deploy what used to just require “Notepad” to code and run. Look at the verbose, “classic” newest JS syntax to declare classes etc. At this point we may as well use any regular language and transpile it to JS.
3. Python: it sort of failed to become “the general purpose language”. Paradoxically, I’ve seen more Go general purpose small apps in such a short Golang life time than Python. However Python has picked up the AI and finance analysis niches and is going to stay strong in them for many years to come.
4. C++: a staple for lots of lower level software, I always developed in C++ in two fashions: the “durable” and the “cool guy” way. The first, makes use of “moderate” C++ features and has stood the eras. The latter, using templates to the fullest, overloaded operators in the most extreme ways etc., is very neat and advanced but makes it hellish to maintain such codebase. By maintain I mean the 10 man years applications I had to upgrade and upkeep for years when I worked for large compaines. Whereas classes, inheritance etc don’t change much over the years, we had an hard time adapting templates and other stuff to (usually proprietary and barely standard) implementations for advanced constructs. Regular C: close to immortal. It’ll last until we’ll have such a grand technological revolution (quantum computers? Programmable DNA?) that C won’t be able to represent its basic structures any more.
5. C#: a totally cool and great programming language, but came late. Came late and for years it got imprisoned in the Microsoft ecosystem. We had mono and little else to work on C# outside of Windows. Add the fact you need a runtime and that the runtime has been really Windows oriented for years and you get a situation where a very nice language (I love it!) remained under-represented compared to its potential. I fear its usage will further decline in the future.
6. Kotlin: I feel it’s overhyped. True, it’s cool and “functional looking” so it’s 2018 fashion too. However it’s been developed by one small company and Google supported it because it was instrumental in their huge litigation with Oracle. Will it survive in the next years? Who knows.
7. Go: initially I dismissed it (despite its Google support!). Whereas I don’t see it as the “PHP / Java killer” some believe it to be, it has its uses. I haven’t done a lot with it, but have used and installed software made with it. It’s rich but still immature, especially when dealing with certain lower level O.S. (Linux is what I have seen) operations. I am not sure it’ll have everlasting success, but it’s here to stay for a while.
8. PHP: always mentioned last and shown like its only virtue is to show the others how something should not be done. PHP is not fashionable, it’s not “cool intellectual friendly”. It’s a workhorse, powering the large majority of the net since 20+ years. I love it. When developing large apps, it’s easier to keep backwards compatibility with PHP than in C++. It just works. Since version 7, it just works and fast. And cheap. If you want to ever work with overseas people, C and PHP (and Python in a lesser way) are the languages to go, period. If you want to create a website or an app that is compatible to African budgets, PHP is the answer. If you want to toy with TONS of stuff spanning from the eldest “C-like” functions a la “strpos()”, PHP does it. If you want to play with Interfaces, traits, contracts, behavioral and unit testing, iterators and maps, PHP does it. If you want to play with generators, fluent functions, lambdas, PHP does it. If you want to write a 1000 Java piece of code in 300 lines of code, PHP does it. Now with types hinting and strict checks “like a good language should do”. If you want to hack a 10 liner for a shell operation, PHP can do that. If you want to write a Fail2ban script, PHP can do that. If you want to develop an uber fast MVC backend, you can use Phalcon (C compiled speed). You could also achieve compiled speed by using HHVM but nowadays PHP 7.2 is so fast that it’s not really worth the hassle, just use the latter.
Needless to say, PHP evolved over > 20 years. Like Java, and Javascript, PHP is “the English language” for the web and there’s no reason for it to stop adapting and evolving for another 20 years.
Every one will be replaced by AI coding directly in binary.
java: What I’ve been programming in for 25 years
javascript: what i program in when I need to
python: what I’d like to program in and occasionally do
C++: what I used to be very proficient at but then the 1990s ended
c#: I barely knew thee
Kotlin: I do java, what does Kotlin bring me other than android?
Go: isn’t that C renewed?
PHP: it appears to have evolved into a real OO language in recent years. I’ll still avoid it
PHP has become the go to standard.
I’ll guess that you had a problem with Fortran?
I suspect the same but we will give up all control.
It depends on what you are building. If a website then it is pretty common. If you are building a data processing app or server side app that has no direct UI then it is not likely.
I agree... It dominates the website development industry now for sure.
Actually, I’m mostly a retired C++ and Java guy with some C# and PHP thrown in. I have a legacy of dozens of languages going back to WATFOR, ALGOL, PL/1, plus various assembly languages. That’s not a big deal, just age. Any experienced programmer can learn to code in a new language in a week or so. They are logically equivalent and frequently syntactically and semantically nearly equivalent. Once you understand the underlying programming model being used, you can quickly come up to speed. Ergo, who really cares what programming language is being used? The interesting part is solving the business/science problem at hand.
no worries, FORTRAN will still be here...
Java fetishes complexity allowing application teams to architect elegant, reusable frameworks with so many layers of idiosyncratic nonsense noone will ever re-use them and the next batch of developers don’t understand the class hierarchies or how to change them when no longer working for the business rules (one size fits all). This gets expensive, coded in cement, outsourced, massive and opaque software leafs to inevitable system death, rebirth, rewrites, then cancelled for smaller, flatter, cloud based Python, Notebooks, cloud functions while noone knows why the microsservices no longer work after Bob or Sally left.
Thank God for Spring Boot.
Nope.
I still miss Pascal.
PHP: The only one on the list that is dying. No one starts a new project in PHP in 2023. Like Cobol it will hang around in legacy systems for decades, but it has been superseded.
C#/C++: The big thing missed is that almost all games are done in one of these two. As long as video games remain a multi billion dollar industry they will prosper.
Python: Any project is just better if you can do it in Python. It’s the default language for all Computer Science programs and will continue its steady rise.
Spring Boot is the only way to go for Java development these days.
... and one language (Rust) to rule them all.
Now you're just hurtin' me! (The 'Turbo' variety, of course, which had a nice module self-test feature).
From the management perspective, you have to think in terms of, “If my entire team left today, which language/platform allows me to replace them quickly and cheaply?”
You can argue the technical merits of one language or the other until the cows come home, but that really is the bottom line.
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