The Hundred-Year Language (Comment)

"What technologies will survive for 100 more years?" is a question that me as a computer science student and many other ask, maybe not in this way but by trying to guess which one will give me most opportunities to find a job or the best paid language outside. No one wants to learn a programming language that cannot land you a job or which its learning curve is to big to create just simple tasks. But how can you really know which one will be still alive if not a single one has ever survived for a hundred years? We are in 2017 and the first programming language that was created was FORTRAN (1957), that gives us a result of 60 years, but wait! FORTRAN is not popular anymore. It was so bad at handling input and output and because of that COBOL was created (1959)¹. However, now a days it is in the same box of "not popular anymore".

Some languages as LISP (1958) or C (1972) are still used today. Python (1991), Java (1995), Ruby (1995), Javascript (1995), C# (2000) and others are also used but they were created more recently (You can check a diagram of the programming languages history on this link). Go (2009) and Swift (2014) are not even in this image². As the essay "The hundred-year language" says, "we should be consciously seeking out situations where we can trade efficiency for even the smallest increase in convenience"³ and that is happening with all the programming languages that come from C. We are having faster machines who can compute languages which are more scalable or easier to program. 

An analogy that comes to my mind is animal evolution and adaptability. There are some that can fly, others that can swim and there are also ones that can run really fast, but this aren't all the abilities which animals can have and they didn't have them since the universe started. I think the same will happen with programming languages, the ones that can adapt better for the future necessities will be the ones that will survive, the rest will end up in the same place as the FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol and so on.

To end this post I would recommend checking the Stack Overflow statistics and also which are the most popular programming languages on Github. Maybe the won't be popular in a hundred years but I'm sure that they are or will be in the next 5 to 10 years.

References:

[1] Ferguson, A. (2000). "A History of Computer Programming Languages." Consulted on Jan 26,
2017 from https://cs.brown.edu/~adf/programming_languages.html

[2] Genealogical Tree of Programming Languages [Image]. Consulted on Jan 25, 2017 from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Genealogical_tree_of_programming_languages.svg

[3] Graham, P. (2003) "The Hundred-Year Language". Consulted on Jan 24, 2017 from http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html