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Comment by Lito P. Cruz on April 7, 2013 at 2:44pm

Hi,

One time I got paid programming in Perl. This was mainly in relation to my work with RDBMS products and also I was responsible for building code, so Perl was very handy and a lot of fun.

However, I do not think Lisp is dying. In fact concepts found in it are way ahead of new languages like Java (where I got paid also programming in it). For example, the idea of garbage collection, the idea of documentation found in code -javadoc. This was already present in Lisp many years ago. Lessons found in Lisp resurface in some incarnation in the new languages, even like Ruby and Python.

My feeling is that eventually Java will die, not right away because it has momentum and a lot of money have been invested into working Java code. That is an asset companies won't easily ditch. Eventually people will learn about functional programming and they will shift to this because it is more elegant and fun, so I say Scala will probably gain ground after Java.

LPC

Comment by Vincent Granville on February 15, 2013 at 11:17am

Interesting comment by one of our readers:

Before saying anything I would take a look to this page with the rank of the most popular programming languages:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

You will see where "Perl" is compared to other more "sexy" and recent languages.
Interesting answer by one of our readers:

And I would recommend a careful reading of this recent post of Nassim Taleb in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/worlds-not-ending-but-technolo...
By Carlos Ortega

Comment by Cole Harris on February 12, 2013 at 6:15am

Every ten years or so I find myself installing an APL interpreter....

Comment by Tim Daciuk on February 10, 2013 at 11:59am

APL... wow, that is a blast from the past.  There are three things I'd like to do, before my life is done.  Write two lines of APL and make the bugger run!  It is about the only thing regarding APL I still remember.

Comment by David Robinson on February 10, 2013 at 4:47am

Two likely dead (or on life support)languages with more than one book on my shelf are FORTH and APL. I got into FORTH when I was working on a homemade telescope controller for an old Newtonian. My dissertation was done completely in APL since I needed a language that was easily recursive. An hour after i wrote a script, i had no clue how it worked. Definitely a 'read once' language.

Comment by Oscar Wijsman on February 10, 2013 at 1:47am

How about a language called Credit. Macro assembler, had to compiled, linked and was run via an interpreter. Extremely efficient for CPU and memory and easy to debug. It was used on the Philips P6xxxx minicomputers with the operating system TOS.