Top 10 Programming Languages that will Go Extinct in 2030

To make a long-lasting career in programming, it is important to know if current languages will hold the turf.

Programming languages do not follow Moore's law but programmers do. Put it simply, programmers depend on lengthy and crappy code in the hope that Moore's law will take care of the memory space it requires. But there is an argument that Moore's law will not hold relevance after 10 years or so. And there are many languages developed as alternatives to the standard languages like C. Recently software developer Drew DeVault released Hearsay which is touted as a simple, robust, and versatile language that aims to be an alternative to the C language. There is every chance that as a programmer you might have to learn new languages very frequently to make progress or to steer it into an altogether new direction. In order to make a long-lasting career in programming, it is important to know if current languages will hold the turf in the coming few years. Here is the list of top 10 programming languages which will lose importance in the coming decade.

R

R is a programming language used basically to process data largely through statistical methods. While it is having significant benefits over other programming languages like Python, it has been losing its popularity among its patrons. Its ranking got down to 11 from 9 on TOIBE index in just one month. Though it may not disappear completely, it will definitely lose its importance given the traction other programming languages are gaining.

Objective-C

When Apple launched Swift, it wanted its developer ecosystem to be used in place of Objective-C. However, the language refused to die because many of the functional apps were written in it. And also, the developers were not ready to shift to Swift.

Visual Basic:

Visual Basic is an old language, which initially appeared on the scene in 1991. As the notion goes, the older technologies are meant to die, Visual Basic is well on its way to passing from sight. And also, Microsoft stopped supporting Visual Basic long back. The reason for its decline in popularity charts also maybe, a newer version, Visual Basic .NET, which is also an object-oriented programming language.

CoffeeScript:

Codementor.io an online coding community-ranked CoffeeScript among the lowest in 2019 itself. Its Facebook community no longer exists and ranks at the bottom among other programming languages for Freenode IRC, Twitter, GitHub, etc. It has also remained the least popular subreddit on the website. In view of all these conditions, it seems it doesn't hold much prospect for serious programmers.

Ruby:

Through this web application's popularity surged in the early 2000s, it has come down in its popularity charts quickly. The reasons for its decline include issues with scalability, lower run-time, and incompatibility with other languages. Big companies like Twitter abandoned Ruby for other languages which offer easier expansion and lower long-term costs. If not immediate future, it will definitely be in danger in the long term.

Perl:

Once regarded as the go-to language for web development, was listed among the top 10 in TOIBE index. Of late it has declined to 18 in the rankings. The possible reason for its decline can be the popularity of Python which lies in the same programming domain. According to experts, it can quickly diminish, cornered with few remaining patrons, if it cannot find new users.

COBOL:

COBOL which stands for Common business-oriented language is primarily used in business, finance and administrative systems for batch and transactional processing jobs. If you have an idea of the scale at which companies are migrating to the cloud, it is suggested to forget thinking about COBOL. It is very much possible that COBOL will be a redundant language in the coming 10 years.

Haskell:

Haskell was initially developed to be a compact language that can be used to handle symbolic computations and list processing applications. Though it has easy-to-use syntax, maintainable code, shorter lead times, and higher reliability, it is constantly losing its importance as a coding language. In a few years, it might become unwanted, as new languages like Go, and Python are fast gaining traction.

Ada:

Ada can be considered a dead programming language that is being kept alive by a few legacy systems. It was developed to replace hundreds of languages used by the US Defence Department. Although it is complex and highly functional, it is losing its importance in favor of new languages.

LISP:

LISP as a programming language is on the verge of failure. The developer community suggests many reasons such as messy syntax with parenthesised prefix notation and is mostly used as a garbage collector. Though it is a versatile and functional language, developers have abandoned it for other more popular languages with similar functionalities.