[superkuh]

>It's extremely stable, ... It's a shame it's so dead,

The former is the consequence of the later. Popularity kills stability. Perl is the ultimate sysadmin language because it's so portable and never changes. We really lucked out with the Raku thing driving people away to python. Because of it my perl scripts I wrote in 2003 run on perl system interpreter today and the vast majority of my perl written today would run on a 2006 perl interpreter (some functions missing in some libs in troublemakers like Gtk bindings, etc), but it's generally very good.

These days with python you can't even run any random script written today on your system python from today. You have to set up an entire separate python for every script. And don't even think about trying to run a python script from 2006. That's what popularity does: fracture.

[ktpsns]

Good old Java is also stable and yet popular. It is not particular "trendy", thought. My feeling is that languages which "live in"/"create" ecosystems such as JVM, BEAM or even LLVM have a better probability to outlive other languages in the long run. Let's see what happens with golang in some years... ;-)

[superkuh]

Stable? Huh. Never thought of Java that way. Dead, yes, but it was never stable. In my experience I have to set up a custom JVM version for every java application I've come across. Is your experience different?

[Romario77]

Dead? Really? It's one of the most popular computer languages. And it constantly evolves and becomes better over time.

[cheema33]

For me, Java died with Oracle shenanigans. I moved to C#. Java isn't truly dead yet but I think it will slowly die off because of Oracle. Same as Solaris and SPARC, but a little slower.