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by IvanK_net 169 days ago
Many non-programmers think that programming languages get outdated, just like operating systems or computer hardware, or even some software (old algorithms replaced by better algorithms), and each programmer should "follow trends", since using the same programming language for 10+ years sounds wrong.

But programming languages are like Math. It is like saying "multiplying is outdated" or "the square root is outdated".

2 comments

if you don't think programming languages can get outdated then why is assembly, fortran, lisp, smalltalk, pascal, basic practically disappeared? programming languages are not like math, it's like the moon
Many of those are still under active development (both language and tooling) and code is still being written in them. They have hardly disappeared.
Nonsense, unless you think the entire field of PL research is doing nothing. The industry learns things and gradually improves, on average.

Do you still write FORTRAN and Perl?