October 14, 2011
Some Scripting Languages you may Want to Make your Peace With
All forecasting is fuzzy. We've let the increasing accuracy of meteorology blind us to this fact, but no one can tell for certain what will happen 5 minutes from now. So any article that tries to tell you what to expect from the future of web hosting you should always take with a grain of salt. That includes this one.
Rather than try to perform this analysis in a vacuum, then, we used our lifeline to the audience for the question: which scripting languages are dying? The results were interesting. Some of the most common answers are listed below, with a summary of the reasons typically given.
One important note: even if a language is indeed dying, it doesn't follow that you can expect web hosts to stop supporting it. Many hosts still offer Frontpage extensions 8 years after that product was discontinued! Still, if what you are trying to do is figure out where to focus your future skill sets, then you might want to think twice before zeroing in on any of the below.
ColdFusion
Is ColdFusion dying? That seemed to be a very long, hotly debated question between 2007 and 2009. On the one hand there doesn't seem to be all that much market demand for it. I went to one job board to compare the numbers. Whereas Javascript listed 537 open offers and AJAX 336, ColdFusion listed 5. On the other hand, Adobe doesn't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down its development, and well, perhaps we can let http://iscoldfusiondying.com/ speak for itself. The jury seems out on this one.
Perl
A user on one web site described Perl as the modern COBOL. Then again, some other users have pointed out that even COBOL hasn't died entirely despite all of the obituaries to the contrary. Perl seems to be caught in a set of competing crosswinds. It's being squeezed out by a proliferation of languages offering features and usability that it lacks, making it not so “sexy” anymore.
At the same time, it was the language of choice during the dot-com boom, meaning there are a gaggle of programmers out there that still swear by it. Therein, though, your answer might be found: if you're learning a new language, do you really want to try to compete with people who have been coding in it for 20 years?
C
This is an even harder one to state with confidence, though there are still good reasons to believe the sun has passed high noon for C. Lacking the object-oriented programming that came later with C++, C's relevance is now largely limited to the fact that it's the backbone of a lot of newer languages like Java, Python and PHP. If Perl is the modern COBOL, is C the modern Latin?
In each of the above cases we found a slew of diverse opinions. Alternately, for just about every language in existence, we found someone who said that it was dying: one person stated that Flash was on its way out. Trying to make this prediction is a very black art (things related to death have that tendency), and you equally don't want to go learning some hot new language just to discover that it was ultimately too quirky to have a long shelf life. Choose carefully, and take serious community feedback on this question. Humans are not the only things that sometimes like to cling to life.
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