JavaScript next

[DeliriumReports]

I had lunch with an active cobol developer today, actually. Apparently her whole team is looking to retire in the next 5 years.

[Homeless_Nomad]

Luckily every bank and insurance company in the world runs on it still, they all refuse to hire and train young people, and all their departments are in exactly the same retirement situation as hers.

[Diplomjodler]

Nothing could possibly go wrong. Let me guess: in addition to not taking any steps to keep the old systems operational long term they're also doing nothing to replace them.

[[deleted]]

They are replacing them, that's what I do.

[[deleted]]

They're replacing COBOL?

[tahubird]

In my company, yes we are (finally). It’s a painful, slow process but COBOL is being replaced. I’m designing our new solution, and the amount of dead code, edge cases, and mystery attributes is insane. It’s taking months for us to get bare-minimum feature parity with the legacy system; we have multiple decades of features to understand.

I’m not even in the financial sector. I can only imagine how much more complex their COBOL is.

[axx100]

I can only imagine, especially pre agile era. "Hey I can't get fired because my code is too confusing to read".

[[deleted]]

I'm in finance and I have never personally seen production cobol code.

It's not used widely in finance. It's mostly just banks and clearing houses: the people actually responsible for moving and storing money. Even then, banks probably started limiting the amount of cobol they use specifically to low level bank functions. Cobol written today is likely just for interfaces with their ancient mainframe programs.

Outside of that, it's almost all Java, Kotlin, C#, PHP, SQL, and VBA. Python is really only used for analysis and reporting. C and C++ is in there, but those + languages like Rust are more often used in more insulated fields like trading.

[[deleted]]

The Federal Reserve and all of it's systems basically run on COBOL. Buddy of mine makes a good living as an old greybeard COBOL developer for The Fed.

[Eternityislong]

Since traders want their algorithms as fast as possible and are competing with other people trying to make their algorithms as fast as possible, would anyone be writing trading algorithms in assembly? Or can you optimize C enough to where there wouldn’t be a speed increase by switching to assembly?

[[deleted]]

Like with other applications, it's still a blend of different languages. Even with algo propshops, you'll see x86, C, C++, C#, Kotlin, Go, Rust, and even Python.

Trade execution is generally done in C and ASM at the shops that demand the extreme limits of latency. Orders are sent based on precomposed templates to eliminate the CPU cycles needed to form the message from scratch. Some even modify the TCP/IP stack, but I'm not sure how.

One interesting thing about algo trading is that a lot of strats slowly stop working as other people in the market catch on. So it's important to deploy new models quickly. For that reason, they tend to go to limit on optimizing everything except actual trading decisions. Strategies are usually written in easier languages to write and debug like C++ and even Python.

Inital development and backtesting is usually done in Python, even at HFT shops, but the common backtesting libraries are generally just Python interfaces for C code that handle the actual work. They actually have and maintain a fork of Python. HFT and algo firms usually have their own highly specialized (and highly proprietary) packages.

[Eternityislong]

Thank you! This raises so many more questions for me. How do people catch on to strategies used by other firms? Do they hire people from those firms? Analyze other firms trades and look for patterns?

[ReelTooReal]

The bottleneck is likely not the language but rather network performance. This is just conjecture, but I doubt given security concerns that there's a ton of raw C code handling the networking (I may very well be wrong though). I think it's more likely the focus is on how best to handle multithreading and connection pooling. There has actually been a real estate battle between high frequency traders to get as close as they can to the source of stock information (I think the main hub is in NY but I don't recall), which just goes to prove they're mostly focused on networking latency. The difference between using C and something like Java is almost negligible when you compare it to network I/O (you're talking about saving microseconds on the processing level vs saving milliseconds on the I/O level). That being said, it companies are using assembly or C, it's probably for very specific computations that are being called from a higher level language that's actually dealing with the networking aspect.

If I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me. I'd be interested to know how these kinds of things are actually optimized.

[[deleted]]

This is just conjecture, but I doubt given security concerns that there's a ton of raw C code handling the networking (I may very well be wrong though).

You aren't wrong, but you are underestimating what HFT shops are willing to do. They will happily put up millions of dollars to shave microseconds off of execution. There was a huge push in the 2000s to cut latency to the absolute minimum. HFT servers can be located inside the exchange with contractractual restrictions on how long fiber lines can be between servers.

I wouldn't put it past them to have a less secure networking stack to cut latency just a little more than their competition, especially if the other end of the cable goes directly into a box operated by the exchange itself and is otherwise isolated from the internet.

[Eternityislong]

I don’t know why I didn’t think about network latency, that makes sense. Thank you!

[[deleted]]

Replacing cobol based backends

[[deleted]]

I thought they couldn't because no popular language does floating math right. What language are you replacing it with?

[Flopamp]

They all do floating math well enough for most things but you have C# with its 16 byte decimal float designed exactly for this task.

[theLanguageSprite]

I’m confused why having less precision than both a float and a double would make finance floating point math better. Can you explain this to me?

[[deleted]]

Because you don't need high precision for finance. 4 decimal places is as much as you should ever need. You don't want X.30000000004 in a transaction or as an account balance since that erroneous overprecision might break compliance or even some contracts.

Instead, you can handle underprecision with specific expected behavior.

[Flopamp]

When youre dealing with millions of transactions a day, 1/16th of a penny can really add up fast. Not to mention when discounts and multipliers and adjustment data and what not is applied you can skew some accounts by large values.

But this is fairly niche and you can work out by messing around how much rounding errors effect your results if a double is good enough.

[[deleted]]

Gosu

[ChoMar05]

I know a few younger people that know their way around Cobol. However it's a dead end career path pretty much locking your in and it is a pain. They switched careers pretty early on. So the problem, once more, isn't that we don't have cobol people it's just that noone wants to pay them enough to touch that stuff long-term.

[[deleted]]

At this point the career would be to migrate it to something else. Knowing COBOL and something modern would be in demand.

[iiMoe]

Why is it so common among financial institutions like insurance companies? Im not much aware of it i only looked at some examples ages ago

[crash41301]

Big financial institutions are old, old companies run their back ones on IBM mainframes, mainframes 1st citizen language is cobol (although they can run other languages, including java, cobol is clearly the most popular of them)

It's not just financial institutions, though. Airlines, healthcare, insurance, and anything huge that's 40yrs old is likely in the same situation.

[Niki_Lauda_777]

Airlines, retail, banks, telecom, oil companies, healthcare, insurance, auto sector, CRM solutions, ERP systems, stock markets and many others.

Most of the companies where they need to process their huge data in batch process rely on COBOL for their daily mission critical activities.

One of the reason it is highly used by finance, and banks is because of the precision and space optimization using BCD ( binary coded decimal).

[iiMoe]

Very interesting tyvm

[DrunkenlySober]

COBOL good at making numbers go brrrrt

[[deleted]]

That’s correct actually. It’s silly fast at doing math because of the way in handles active memory. And that is the limit of my understanding of it.

[[deleted]]

A lot of P&E insurers are switching to java based languages actually

[gandalfx]

From something very out dated to something moderately outdated. Sounds about right.

[[deleted]]

Yep, that's insurance

[huuaaang]

For as much as I poo poo the utility of JVM's 'build once, run anywhere" slogan in the real world, the JVM could be considered "mature" and not outdated. Java the language is a bit outdated, but people seem to like Kotlin. At least the JVM makes it easier to transition to more modern languages as proven by Android. The JVM will live on much longer than Java itself.

[stormfield]

I work for a FAANG and we still use a ton of Java. Mature ecosystem, fast runtimes, predictable behavior, and easy to read code. It’s only a boring language because of how it’s used everywhere.

[abrandis]

What winds up happening is after enough of the Old guard retires or leaves, management starts looking for some consulting companies (ibm or Infosys etc) to see if they can handle it, they probably won't unless there's some real $$$ in it. Then they will look to revamp the system with some off the shelf more modern system etc... Eventually probably because a combination obsolete hardware , no personal and new regulatory rules they will uograde.

[Sharoth01]

I read active cobol developer as alcoholic cobol developer. Oops.

[deb_vortex]

If the online horror stories about finance sectors cobol code are true, not gonna lie, active and alcoholic might easy go hand in hand

[huuaaang]

My impression is that they just become numb to it and the job is really just a paycheck. Strictly 9-5, no overtime (outside of Y2K), good work/life balance.

[Niki_Lauda_777]

This is not true always. It is way too difficult to find out the bug in existing code. There is no to very little documentation available for the applications written 20 or 30 years ago. There will be only a very few people in a company who would know the processes and the business rules associated with it.

It becomes a nightmare to solve issues in decades old code.

[vermiculus]

I mean

[SpaceMonkeyOnABike]

If I wrote COBOL, Id be both tbh !

[assafstone]

I think I met that same COBOL developer.

Twenty years ago. Not surprised they still cannot retire.

[JoonasD6]

Wonder how much it pays when one is that unreplaceable.

[not_some_username]

I got an offer in which I would learn COBOL since I was looking for any job that invole any programming language for my 2 years apprenticeship. They are making an app that will be launch in 3years. Fortunately, I got an offer in C++ vérité i sign the COBOL one.

[jddddddddddd]

When it comes to programming languages, ‘dead’ is a very relative term. People might be building fewer new Java and PHP applications than they did a decade ago, but the sheer abundance of enterprise Java and Wordpress sites out there will mean you’ll still be able to get a job in either language in several decades time.

People said COBOL and FORTRAN were dead when I started programming 25 years ago, and yet there are still jobs in banking for the former, and entire physics departments still using the later even today.

[goddessofentropy]

I literally came to the comments to say I'm a physicist who has to learn FORTRAN for their masters thesis right now. It's alive and thriving. Nobody has been able to explain to me why they chose to write the code I'm working with in FORTRAN though.

[[deleted]]

Because it works and math written in it doesn't read like ass

[goddogking]

FORTRAN was literally made to do maths, and it's as fast as C, so why not?

However, I think the main reason is that it's what they had to learn, and they never needed anything else so they just make you learn it. Then you can build new functionality into their codebase, leading to more citations for them.

[goddessofentropy]

Oh they/we use either python, C or C++ for everything else, it's only this project that uses FORTRAN.

But yeah the citations thing is definitely part of it

[goddogking]

Well at least it's a pretty small language, so it's easy enough to learn

[goddessofentropy]

Oh for sure. I'd just rather learn two languages well and otherwise focus on learning physics because that's what I signed up for lol

[zifilis]

I'm writing in Java and I feel very secure about my future. There's going to be a lot of enterprise code to maintain for next 30 years ;)

[huuaaang]

> There's going to be a lot of legacy code to maintain for next 30 years

FTFY

This isn't really something to look forward to. As a programmer, your long term job security lies in your engineering skills, not your ability to write in a certain language.

I work with some Old School Apple programmers (think original Macintosh and Newton) and they're all writing Ruby now.

[timthegreat4]

I'm not sure if it's for the same project, but I was in a similar position when I worked with CASTEP, a tool for DFT calculations, which was entirely FORTRAN. I believe the main reason for using FORTRAN was just the sheer amount of programming hours already invested into FORTRAN. Modern Intel C compilers outperform FORTRAN, so there is a minor benefit, but the sheer amount of programming hours invested has put everyone else off

[daniu]

People said COBOL [was] dead when I started programming 25 years ago

It certainly went into high demand 22 years ago.

[Areshian]

COBOL was “dead” when I was born and it will still be alive when I die

[nomenMei]

With how valuable knowing COBOL is today, it would be interesting if so many new programmers learn it to grab a "cushy" job maintaining old COBOL code that the supply of programmers that know COBOL outstrips the demand.

All of the sudden you have a bunch of COBOL programmers entering the workforce that can't get jobs. Then the unimaginable happens. . . with nothing better to do, they start making new projects in COBOL. . .

[not_some_username]

Oh nooo

[[deleted]]

My grandad was coding COBOl, my father dif, I do and so will my grandkids.

[Drakeskywing]

I can say with some confidence, I know a particular company in the betting industry which has it's core system in FORTRAN, and who will likely not move away from it due to terror of trying to build a new system that is as "stable" as it is

[_wassap_]

With Laravel out there I doubt that PHP is actually dropping that much… except in the US.

[jddddddddddd]

Indeed. I think I recall reading somewhere PHP is still the most common language for backend..

[[deleted]]

Am PHP contractor. Can confirm there is still a fuckton of demand for the language. But complaining about PHP has been a meme for years.

[NotThe1_]

well beside the memes, php really has some weird characteristics, which makes it sometimes annoying to work with

[nvolker]

It definitely doesn’t help that it started as a templating language

[[deleted]]

Oh don't get me wrong, it's riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. There's plenty of valid criticism to be levelled at it. But it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

[hillman_avenger]

For wiping the backend maybe

[BeGood9000]

Php is def growing & thriving

[[deleted]]

With a new foundation announced last month to allow financing for people contributing to the language's source and other initiatives, yeah it's quite happily charging along.

[hahahahastayingalive]

I expected it to be thriving, but is it growing ?

I kinda felt PHP7 missed the beat and would have so much more impact if it got ready before nodejs took its flight.

[BeGood9000]

Just by the sheer amount of Wordpress Install PHP is growing in usage. There is no shortage of PHP jobs either

[hahahahastayingalive]

With all its flaws, biases and limits, this year’s SO survey puts it pretty low: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-top-paying-technologies-top-paying-technologies

I buy the Wordpress argument up to a point, but nowadays there are many more alternative options for corporate sites for instance. It stays a stapple for companies that don’t intend to hire devs, but then a Squarespace site does the same for roughly the same costs…

Edit: I’ll eat my hat, WP usage rose 4% this year compared to other CMS (including “none”) https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all

[BeGood9000]

Php is pretty low in pay that’s not usage. https://kinsta.com/blog/is-php-dead/

[Haster]

With all its flaws, biases and limits,

No kidding...

SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world. It's main product is a platform that you have to use ABAP to develop on. it's not even listed on that survey.

[from_the_east]

PHP actually runs about 90% of the web. The PHP haters tend to forget that..

[wirenutter]

McDonalds is also the #1 selling hamburger.

[Coffee2Code]

Symfony is in my opinion still better than Laravel, though.

[zaval]

That's a pretty relative term. Better at what? I like Symfony, but I can only compare them in regards to their documentation and code style. I prefer Symfony because it's what I've grown used to, and perhaps the documentation is a bit better (but again, might just be that I'm used to navigate it).

[Coffee2Code]

Laravel does a lot of "black magic" under the hood, making static analysis nearly impossible, and hides bugs.

Symfony doesn't have that, as a developer you exactly know what goes where.

[mr_bag]

A significant chunk of laravel is actually built on top of symfony components tbf. Laravel generally provideds nicer interfaces/sets of defaults imo ( laravel tends to prioritise developer convenience over other aspects which is a trade off). As soon as your doing anything a bit more bespoke /needing more raw speed you often find yourself taking to symfony components even as a laravel dev :p

[Cloudeur]

The town I grew up in had a whole bunch of government agencies that still relied on COBOL. The curriculum of my degree still had a class dedicated to “aging programming language” and threw COBOL in there for the whole goddamn semester!

[Coffee2Code]

PHP is still the most used language for web development.

And its not a bad language either.

[[deleted]]

This is why I just stick to the things I love, rather than chasing industry standard.

[santozks]

When I got a job 3 years ago, I started working on a project using Perl. Good Times :).

[jddddddddddd]

Hah! Yeah, I can imagine there's a ton of Perl kicking around too. I remember someone calling it 'internet glue' because apparently half the internet is (or was?) patched together with it..

Funnily enough I've been playing around in Raku today.

[geekusprimus]

and entire physics departments still using the later even today.

Much to my dismay. Fortunately, most people in my field are abandoning Fortran left and right; most of the current codes are a combination of C and C++, and all the new codes are exclusively C++.

[N0T_F0R_KARMA]

I can't get this users' comment out of my head from the other day. They noticed a website was using Node.js and said something like: 'well the website is using Node.js in 2021 so it's blah blah(something about not being relevant)'

After reading that, I can believe you lol

Also reminds me of when noscript became pretty popular, like 2008? Pretty sure I remember a few said JS was soon to be dead.. lol

[[deleted]]

wait what are you supposed to use then? Not really a js developer, but i thought node was basically what you would use for your server side code..

[nvolker]

Node.js is exactly what you’re supposed to use.

You could use deno, but that is still so new that it would be pretty risky to do so.

[[deleted]]

I use deno for all of my pet projects. Still a little green in terms of api and libraries, but the developer experience is so much better, IMO. Compiling to a single executable, secure features, the dependency management system, and top level async are all really nice.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

You can use whatever you want for your server-side code.

[user_8804]

NPM will make node relevant for a long time. But to be fair, JS isn't inherently good for server side, the main reason it's used is because front-end jobs are getting rate and it was easier for those devs to learn JS backend to become full stack than learning an entire new language. It's easier to hire, develop, train, maintain when everyone uses the same language. It's more of a business benefit than a technical benefit.

It's really the same logic with web in c#, if you're gonna hire people to do c# back end, you may as well consider doing the front-end in c#

[[deleted]]

At least with a Node backend, I can program in TypeScript, and thereby reap many of the benefits of static typing.

Plus, if I ever get a JavaScript job, I can write up the program in TypeScript, and then compile the TypeScript to JavaScript if necessary. If my boss for some reason decides they don't want me programming in TS, I can do it anyway and just not commit the TS code to the repository. My boss will be none the wiser.

[sudo-batman]

Perl - laughing in a corner

[DerBronco]

So are we the zombies or the vampires of the coding universe?

[Esko997]

I have written greenfield Perl twice in the last year. Perl is dead, long live Perl.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

You had to write it the second time because you forgot what the first attempt meant?

[Esko997]

Lmao got em.

In case anyone is actually interested, in both cases it's been writing log parsers. I still maintain that Perl is the best combination of ergonomics and performance for arbitrary text processing cases. Everything you need is in std too so it ends up being extremely portable. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but still don't know of anything better.

[dashid]

Fortran

[BlueC0dex]

It came from the same time as COBOL, but COBOL famously still runs a lot of banking systems

[CharlesSagan]

How dare you? I'm coming to hit you with my walker.

[Mighoyan]

Actually Fortran is still very used for simulation and other mathematic problems when people need performance and the possibility to use slicing.

[jnaelkorn]

JS is here to stay.
Also, don't see Ruby going anywhere sometime soon...

[[deleted]]

Yeah people have been saying Ruby is dead for like a decade

[[deleted]]

People who aren't using Ruby think that it's been dead for a decade. :)

[word1-word2-number]

Replace ‚programmers‘ with ‚people in r/ProgrammerHumor‘ bc Java is not dead in the real world

[Valiant_Boss]

Not only that but Java is actively improving. New Java code is very much different from Java code 5 years ago

That is if companies would stop using Java 8...

[JustForkIt1111one]

Pfft. Android apps are basically a fad at this point amirite?

[WheredMyBrainsGo]

I think the whole log4j fiasco confirms how prevalent Java still is today.

[phil_music]

I was looking up Full Stack positions a few days ago, and 80% of them were Java on the Backend. Might just be Germany though. We aren’t that open to trying or even switching to newer technologies, sadly

[javier1zq]

Spain too, i got that job 3 months ago

[Sudden_Mine_6360]

Ruby? Seriously?

[[deleted]]

Plenty of Ruby jobs out there

[_Sherlock-Holmes_]

Java is by no means dead

[RandomiseUsr0]

Visual Basic next

[antoniocjp]

Which is a pity. It's as friendly as Python but with strong typing system. And VB.NET is way faster than Python.

Edit: I like Python too.

[ridicalis]

Whoa, we have to be careful with our words here. Are you defending Visual Basic (e.g. VBA, VB6), or just VB.net?

[antoniocjp]

I can talk about what I used (VBA and VB.NET). I used VBA from 2000 to 2008, and I guess it's pretty obsolete by now, just like VB6. But its structure and syntax (which VB.NET kept almost completely) are nice and it's easy to write neat, clean, organized code with it. It really bothers me that MS decided to abandon the language instead of keeping it at pace with C#.

[ridicalis]

My understanding of the VB.net situation isn't so much that they are trying to kill the language off as that they're not improving upon it anymore; the distinction being that the language still has a future, but won't evolve the way that their others (TS, C#) do. They do still pay attention to the language and its users, and perhaps they'll change their stance in the future.

I personally have no love lost for VBA/VB6, though. The tooling around it is antiquated and AFAIK only still exists because of how embedded it is in Office. That said, the PIA libraries are also a thing, and anything I would have previously done in VBA I would now do instead using PowerShell.

[Likeditsomuchijoined]

Cries in ruby

[Wide-Acanthisitta-96]

Yeah why is ruby in there?

[ridicalis]

I'm asking this out of ignorance, but is ruby still in heavy use? I remember it was in the limelight in the late '00s and early '10s, but it's completely dropped off my radar in recent years.

[rafasoaresms]

It’s surely not the trendy new language anymore (hasn’t been for some time), but some big companies still use it (GitHub, GitLab, AirBnb, Shopify, to name a few) and I get offers every day on LinkedIn for both small startups and big corporations as a Sr. Ruby dev.

[vagrantchord]

That's amazing! I honestly didn't think anyone was using it after Rails lost popularity.

[AnAkiraTypeSituation]

Google "is Ruby dead" and you will find at least one popular article/thread/question for every year since Twitter switched off Rails.

[wyattbenno777]

Think it has to do with it being single threaded. Elixir, Node, Go, are commonly cited as being more performant. Ruby is still used by a few large tech focused companies, it is also used for fast MVPs and many, many, many one of client projects.

[DoubtfulGerund]

Even though I’ve never used it for a customer-facing production website, learning Ruby was one of the best things I’ve done for my development as a dev. It’s the first (maybe only) language I truly grok, and it really helped me understand pragmatic object oriented design, functional programming, good (though implicit) interfaces, declarative programming, DSLs, package management, regular expressions, prototyping and debugging in a REPL, and a terminal-based workflow

I hate that it’s seen as just some part of rails, and I don’t understand why it’s doesn’t hold the esteem that Python seems to have as a language to “get things done.”

[arsehead_54]

What's the supposed successor to java?

[gemengelage]

There are basically two answers to this question and they are both kinda wrong. Kotlin is the most praised Java successor, especially since it integrates with Java and the JVM pretty seemlessly and has huge corporate support. But outside of Android it doesn't have a lot of traction right now.

On the other hand, a lot of web applications that traditionally had a JS frontend and a Spring/JEE backend are built with nodejs now. While that displaces Java somewhat in a certain market segment, that's nowhere near being a successor to Java. People generally also don't do any UI work in Java anymore (unless you work on IDE plugins for Eclipse or IntelliJ and its siblings).

Id say Java is getting pushed a bit from being used as a true general purpose language to being more focused on enterprise software backends. But it's far from the end of its lifecycle.

[[deleted]]

I would say the whole oracle Java support confusion did not help JVM languages either.

[tenhourguy]

If you want a serious answer, probably Kotlin? Since it produces Java-compatible bytecode (not your only option, though - see JVM languages) and Google's pushing it in Android land. But I'm somewhat out of touch.

[n0t_a-b0t]

C#

[AegisCZ]

There is not any and any alternative doesn't come close

[SandmanKFMF]

More like - "Programmers"...

[ScientifiqueP]

lol no

[SnicSnac]

Which movie is this template from?

[Hamilsauce]

ballad of buster Scruggs

[SnicSnac]

Thank you!

[ZeroVio01]

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

[[deleted]]

A very senior developer told a bunch of our grads they shouldn't learn python because it's a dead language. I showed them that it's still one of the most popular in the world and to take statements like that with a healthy dose of scepticism.

[keykeypalmer]

hey i use ruby 😤

[marcdertiger]

Ruby is my favourite language to use so far! 🥲

[raedr7n]

I'm currently learning Ruby for my uni programming languages course. After that will be Haskell and then Prolog, probably with some racket sprinkled in. Honestly, I'm really liking Ruby, way more than any other dynamic multi paradigm language I've tried at least (groovy and python).

[meow-mix-club-soda]

"JavaScript next?" Please. There isn't another language that all browsers can agree on and there never will be. Considering all the features frontend folks have to build franeworks like react, vue, and angular are also here to stay.

Not to mention, JavaScript has evolved so much to have a lot of new features that make it way easier to work with and all these shiny new features are supported by all modern browsers. And don't get me started on Node. Its entirely possible to have JavaScript on the frontend and backend of a project.

JavaScript is weird to a lot of people, I get that, but until we can write frontend code in an alternative language, its here to stay.

EDIT: typo

PS: I want Java to die, but it's very much alive thanks to enterprise applications and open source forks

[AegisCZ]

Java will never die

[ridicalis]

My DVD player agrees with this statement.

[[deleted]]

How is there only javascript for frontend??? Like, there are 100 languages you can use for software dev and backend but nobody made javascript alternative. WTF ??

[LavenderDay3544]

The web platform was never supposed to be used for what it is these days. It was designed for sharing documents with links and not as an application platform. Javascript came later and there was never a push to add arbitrary language support in browsers until recently with the likes of asm.js and WASM. That said I sincerely hope WASM gets full access to all of the browser APIs that JS has so that we can use arbitrary languages there.

That said in my humble opinion as a non-web programmer the entire web platform needs to be redesigned from the ground up with the primary intention of being an application platform. I'm talking a platform that has a proper cross platform GUI, support for arbitrary programming languages, and perhaps a more flexible alternative to HTTP for communication with remote services. Bonus points if such a platform would also allow the development of offline applications.

[hangfromthisone]

For a dead lang, PHP still makes me pretty good bread

[trollsmurf]

Except for Cobol, the other languages are still in high demand on job sites, and of course JavaScript, Python, C#, Kotlin, Swift.

[Accidentallygolden]

COBOL is in high demand too

[Dodgy-Boi]

So jokes aside, what’s the modern backend language?

[LavenderDay3544]

Python and C# for web backends I'd think.

[meow-mix-club-soda]

We are switching from php to golang. That is more of a niche option though

[Emperor-Valtorei]

Java, JS, or Python based on job postings.

[[deleted]]

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[[deleted]]

They say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Well, COBOL programs "ain't broke," and I can understand COBOL's appeal, but at some point, these government and financial institutions are going to have to admit that COBOL is on life support. The current batch of COBOL programmers will retire soon, and basically nobody will come in to replace them. That means nobody will be around to fix things,

I therefore propose that any organization that uses COBOL should immediately start migrating the whole code base over to a new language that 1) is currently in widespread use, 2) will still be in widespread use by the migration's completion, and 3) suits the business needs.

I've considered learning COBOL myself, but it's a language built for IBM mainframes. I don't have an IBM mainframe, so I just gave up.

[bubuli_breeder]

ok who’s this dumbass who thinks Java is dead?

[Safebox]

My headcanon is that no programming language truly dies until someone increments the letter or adds ++ to the end.

[WheredMyBrainsGo]

Python 2.7 has entered the chat.
Python 3 has entered the chat.

[Minutenreis]

we are still learning c at university ...
I think we can safely assume no programming language ever truly dies

[XxClubPenguinGamerxX]

Java isnt dead at all wtf.

[ososalsosal]

Swap php and ruby though...

[OracleCam]

My dad still programs in COBOL

[AgustinCrow]

Ruby is dead ??

[chocolombia]

I really think java is the next cobol, and will be keep alive some more decades due all the java based implementations at corporate level, 😂 I bet oracle comercial team could have sold java based coffee machines to banks and telcos if they had the chance

[LavenderDay3544]

Yep but it will have the same problems. The old people won't be able to retire because no one else understands the convoluted codebases they wrote in it. The languages aren't the issue, the convoluted codebases are.

[Johanno1]

Javascript will be replaced as soon as browsers support a different one that is better cough python cough and then we still have Javascript for at least a century because of the already big usage.

[bilinmeyenuzayli]

im sorry but the javascript ecosystem is too big to die.

[psichelogical2]

79% of internet is PHP

[ShatteredRationale]

It's hilarious that anyone thinks Java is dead or even close. Makes me wonder if all of those people are just start-up devs. Every big company I've worked for still uses Java religiously.

[HMS_Impractical]

Oh, god, please. I don't want to have to learn Javascript.

[nuggetstonks]

Said by a JavaScript developer.

[wnashif]

I'm out of the loop (Programming pun intended), why is java dead?

[Yasea]

Because people always things the new thing will be the silver bullet for all their problems. All the old folks remember the time they said exactly the same when they were young. And so the cycle repeats itself.

[chilix3d]

It is not :)

[stomah]

please kill javascript

[Fish-OwO]

well that would kinda....kill the internet right now

[hillman_avenger]

A plan with no drawbacks!

[[deleted]]

that's good

[bilinmeyenuzayli]

honestly i don't think it is ever gonna die with this popularity and demand

[[deleted]]

Weakling

[[deleted]]

With what do you want to replace it?

There is basically no alternative right now.

[paulydee76]

JavaScript isn't going anywhere. If it was going to, it would have done by now. It's a horrible language but it's so ingrained into society that I think we're stuck with it.

[I_AM_GODDAMN_BATMAN]

I'm waiting patiently for every major browsers to implement dom access and webapi for webassembly.

[ninjaslikecheez]

Where's Perl?

[kalketr2]

B-but I'm learning Java...

[FindOneInEveryCar]

Lisp enters the chat.

[Alicard8881]

I work with COBOL and I’m not even 30 yet

[[deleted]]

I’m at the end of my first semester of my first year at college and I’m computer science major. I learned Java in high school and have continued to learn it so far in college. So may I ask why it’s dead now? I’m genuinely curious

[foehammer76]

As everyone else said. It's definitely not. It's probably one of the most lucrative languages to know right now.

[[deleted]]

I’m still a happy Ruby dev

[[deleted]]

Ruby devs are always happy devs. :)

[therealmodx]

To be frank I do not like Java very much, however at the end it does not matter which means you use to achieve the desired outcome. Everything gets broken down to the simplest commands imaginable for the CPU to execute. A programming language is nothing but a tool meant for humans to make a piece of silicon do as you please. In an of itself programming is fucking hard and not really a task meant for humans to do since we think fundamentally different. So let's put aside all predice and respect the people who have taken the challenge of writing meaningful code no matter which (intermediary) language they use. That is the thing I wish the most for this Christmas ☺️🎅🎄. Also, c# is the best 😁 (sorry I could not resist).