Five Programming Languages Likely to Disappear Within the Next 20 Years

With the rapid growth of the IT industry, many new programming languages emerge, but only a few become mainstream; older languages that fail to evolve risk being forgotten. This article predicts five languages that could disappear in the next 20 years.

Ruby was released in 1999 and quickly gained popularity, especially with the Ruby on Rails framework in 2004, placing it at the top of language rankings for a decade. However, its execution speed is slower than JavaScript, Go, and Python, and its MVC architecture feels outdated, leading to a decline in usage.

Visual Basic was introduced by Microsoft in 1991 as a primary tool for Windows development. Its popularity waned after C# appeared in 2000, offering a cleaner syntax and broader functionality for cloud and mobile development. Microsoft has stopped further development of VB.

Haskell is an older functional language created decades ago and used mainly in research. Its steep learning curve, lack of recent updates (the last stable release was in 2010), and a very small active community suggest it may soon become obsolete.

Perl gained fame in 1987 as a versatile scripting language for both beginners and professionals. Its dominance faded after Python emerged in 1991, and its usage has steadily declined over the past 15 years.

Objective‑C has been used for macOS, iOS, and OS X development since 1996, but Swift, released by Apple in 2014, offers modern features, automatic memory management, and better type safety. Consequently, Objective‑C is expected to be phased out.

In summary, programming languages that do not innovate will eventually be eliminated; their survival depends on community investment and continuous improvement.

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