Five Programming Languages Predicted to Die

Developers tend to adopt new languages, leaving older ones to either fade in popularity or become obsolete; this article predicts five languages facing extinction.

Perl

Perl once popular but now superseded by Perl 6; the author provides a simple “Goodbye World” CGI script in Perl.

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
print "Goodbye,world!\n";

Ruby

Ruby peaked around 2000‑2010 but declined after major projects like Twitter moved away; examples include a “Goodbye World” script and a factorial program.

puts 'Byebye,MissAmericanRuby!DrovemyChevytotheLevie…'
puts '2011 was the day that Ruby died, yeah…'

def fact(n)
  if n == 0
    1
  else
    n * fact(n-1)
  end
end
puts fact(ARGV[0].to_i)

Visual Basic.NET

VB.NET emerged from classic BASIC but was quickly eclipsed by C#; a sample VB.NET “Hello World” program is shown.

Imports System
Public Module modmain
  Sub Main()
    Console.WriteLine("HelloWorldusingVisualBasic!")
  End Sub
End Module

Adobe Flash and AIR (ActionScript)

Flash and AIR relied on ActionScript, a JavaScript variant; with the decline of Flash, ActionScript usage vanished; a simple ActionScript “Hello World” example is provided.

package {
  import flash.display.*;
  import flash.text.*;
  public class HelloWorld extends Sprite {
    private var greeting:TextField = new TextField();
    public function HelloWorld() {
      greeting.text = "HelloWorld!";
      greeting.x = 100;
      greeting.y = 100;
      addChild(greeting);
    }
  }
}

Delphi’s Object Pascal

Object Pascal, once strong in Delphi, has been largely abandoned in favor of C# and C++; a minimal “Hello World” Pascal program is included.

program HelloWorld;
begin
  writeln('You say goodbye.')
end.