Replacing a language

Do programming languages ever get replaced? Languages are introduced, and some rise and fall in popularity (and some rise after a fall), but very few ever disappear completely.

There are some languages that have disappeared. Two are FLOW-MATIC and NELIAC, languages from the 1950s.

Some languages have fallen to very low levels of usage. These include BASIC, PL/I, PL/M, and DIBOL.

Some languages never die (or at least haven't died yet). The go-to examples are COBOL and FORTRAN. Organizations continue to use them. Fortran is used for some parts of the R implementation, so anyone using R is in a sense using Fortran. We can include SQL in this list of "immortal" programming languages.

Some languages are replaced with new versions: C# version 6 replaced a very similar C# version 5, for example. VB.NET replaced VB6. And while there are a few people who use the old Visual Basic 6, they are a very small number.

The replacement of a language isn't so much about the language as it is about popularity. Several groups measure the popularity of languages: Tiobe, Stack Overflow, the Popularity of Programming Languages (PYPL)... They all rank the languages and show pretty tables and charts.

The mechanics of popularity is such that the "winners" (the most popular languages) are shown, and the "losers" (the less popular languages) are omitted from the table, or shown in a small note at the bottom. (Not unlike the social scene in US high schools.)

If we use this method, then any language that enters the "top 10" or "top 40" (or "top whatever") chart is popular, and any language that is not in the list is not popular. A language that never enters the "top" list is never really replaced, because it never "made it".

A language that does enter the "top" list and then falls out of it has been replaced. That language may still be used, perhaps by thousands, yet it is now considered a "loser".

For this method (referring to the Tiobe index), languages that have been replaced include: Objective-C, COBOL, Prolog, and Ada. They were popular, once. But now they are not as popular as other languages. (I can almost hear the languages protesting a la Norma Desmond: "We are big! It's the programs that got small!")

Sometimes we can state that one specific language replaced another. VB.NET replace VB6, because Microsoft engineered and advertised VB.NET to replace VB6. The same holds for Apple and Swift replacing Objective-C. But can we identify a specific language that replaced COBOL? Or a single language that replaced FORTRAN? Did C++ replace C? Is Rust replacing C++?

We can certainly say that, for a specific project, a new language replaces an older one. Perhaps we can say the same for an organization, if they embark on a project to re-write their code in a new language. I'm not sure that we can make the assertion for the entire IT industry. IT is too large, with too many companies and too many individuals, to verify such a claim in absolute terms. All we can rely on is popularity.

But popularity is not the measure of a language. It doesn't measure the language's capabilities, or its reliability, or its ability to run on multiple platforms.

We don't care about popularity for the technical aspects of the language. We care about the popularity of a language for us, for ourselves.

Product managers care about the popularity of a language because of staffing. A popular language will have lots of people who know it, and therefore the manage will have a (relatively) easy time of finding candidates to hire. An obscure language will have few candidates, and they may demand a higher wage.

Individuals care about the popularity of a language because it means that there will be lots of companies hiring for that skill. Few companies will hire for an obscure programming language.

This essay has meandered from replacing a language to popularity of languages to the concerns of hiring managers and candidates. That's probably not a coincidence. Economic activity drives a lot of behavior; I see no reason that programming should be exempt. When thinking about a programming language, think about the economics, because that will contribute a lot to the language's life.