Discussion on:

10 development technologies that refuse to die

A more and more larger companies become entrenched with using computers along with proprietary software, they can ill-afford the cost to totally replace that software with something new, Unless a company's business model radically changes, what is the inducement to spend the large amount of money for new software to do the same thing? (As an aside for Windows-8...what is the inducement for companies to move to Windows-8 when XP and Windows-7 applications are serving them very well?)

Inducement would be lack of support, from Microsoft, for XP and no updated manufacturer drivers for new hardware or updated/supported applications for XP.

*XP is slated to be EoL April 2014 along with Office 2003.

Factor in ~8 months to test all your applications and hardware and another ~2 years for deployment, depending on your target audience, and crunch time is now.

Why do you put technologies like C/SQL/Java on this list? I enjoy most of the articles, but this one is plain stupid.

Far from being legacy dinosaurs, all three of these are still wildly popular because they are, quite simply, the best at what they do.

Then put COBOL on this list as well, ??ause it's the best language for processing batches of large amounts of business data.

I'm having a difficult time figuring out what it is that you think is the thing Java does better than anything else. Maybe it's marketing, or bureaucracy, or entangling companies that use it in lawsuits. I agree that it's an odd choice to include in this list, at least without a better explanation for including it than what is provided in the article, but I don't think hosannas to the wonders of Java's unspecified wonders are really very meaningful or reasonable.

What does java do best? Write it once. Compile it once. Distribute to Android, Windows, *nix, or Mac. Same executable runs on x86, x86x64, MIPS, and ARM.

I'm sitting here and thinking about Chrome OS. The browser is the o/s. Great for web-apps, but what about local stuff? Maybe the answer is to include a TomCat with it. http://localhost:8080/my-local-app.jsp. What's the CPU behind it? Who cares.

You could do the same with PHP, but PHP doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, have the equivalent of a WAR file. The WAR would allow localized web apps to be a commercial production. And Java makes it easy.

QUOTE: What does java do best? Write it once. Compile it once. Distribute to Android, Windows, *nix, or Mac. Same executable runs on x86, x86x64, MIPS, and ARM.

Objective Caml, Ruby, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Forth, some Lisp implementations, Tcl, ActionScript, Eiffel and Erlang, MATLAB, Lua, and nominally C#, among many other languages, all run in similarly portable runtimes that execute code in an intermediate state of compilation (bytecode much like Java's, in most cases). In addition to that uncomfortable (for many Java partisans) fact, many of these languages' runtimes are more easily installed across a wide range of platforms.

QUOTE: Maybe the answer is to include a TomCat with it.

That's a terrible idea. Following that line of thought, we might as well install everything on every computer. Everything.

Server side, yes, from what I've heard from Java developers, it runs on any platform with a JVM. Client side (with a GUI), again what I've heard from Java developers, hasn't been so lucky. That's been plagued for years by sluggish performance, apps. that break when you switch platforms, and ever changing API specifications. It has not been a pretty picture.

PHP is embedded in HTML documents, so no, we probably wouldn't even have "PHP with no rich media" without HTML.

There are better ways to get "rich media" than Flash, though, and as far as I'm concerned Flash can die in a fire. While we're at it, PHP can jump into the bonfire as well, and leave us with some better programming languages for the Web.

I dunno. Maybe Justin James was making an oblique reference to XHTML, which was a better direction for Web markup to go than a new version of HTML, but for some reason people decided to invent HTML5 and now we're stuck with it.

Not everything on this list is there because it's 'legacy'. Read the descriptions carefully and the reasons for their presence (from the author's point of view) should become apparent.

I don't agree with everything he's written here but I do see his point of view and regardless of my disagreements found the article entertaining.

I guess devs working with the languages written would take offence easier (because just like everyone else, Devs can get stuck in their ways, too) but unless you are a narrow-minded sort or a Dev whose skill-set was recently developed into these languages I don't see anything here that would make you go 'stoopid artikkal!'

Give the man a break and go and write your own list. hell, post your alternative list here as a response and I'm sure it'd be well received.

......that would earn me a minus. Sort of helps to prove my point. Did the chap who -1'd me come from a Dev background using one of these languages, I wonder?

I still say if you are upset by the list the author writes, post your alternatives here. I'd certainly love to see them.

I think the gigantic bucket of upvotes for a basically contentless comment calling the article "stupid" is a pretty good indicator of how the community at TR is getting overrun these days by a bunch of people who have no appreciation for meaningful discussion. As such, it is zero surprise to me that you got a downvote for a thoughtful comment about the article's intent and a suggestion that people contribute thought provoking content and treat people as human beings. I've seen similar events in other discussion threads recently, where about the least meaningful, most utterly contentless sour-grapes comment in a discussion has an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else in the discussion. It makes me wonder whether a shift in the community membership of TR is reaching some kind of critical mass of people who aren't interested in thought-provoking content, and just want flame bait or (quite the opposite) confirmations of their biases.

People nowadays, no matter what area of expertise, dont want anything smart, thought prokoking, or "good" in nature. People love contraversy, gossip, rumor-mongering. All you have to do is watch you local news to see this. Unfortunatly, this "disease" is starting to spill over into other forms of media. Plus, there is no way to stop this. I great way to be noticed it to cause contrayversy. Say anything bad about google, apple, or internet security and you will see how the comments areas get flooded with idiots trying to prove how smart they are by arguing with people they have never met. This truly is the "end of days" and I welcome it.

I would vote yes for both you and dl_wraith but the old Navy Browser I am using will not permit it. Regarding controversy all you have to do is look at congress, to see the cost of embracing controversy rather than content.

Thank you all. I thought I was heading for deleted comment city right there. Shows you what I know. Guess denizens of T'interweb can still surprise me.

Thanks for making me smile

The article is not "10 development technologies that should die." It is "10 development technologies that refuse to die." It is about long used technologies that we are so dependent on, that it'll take a very long time to switch to something better (once it comes along). Java, for instance, is not a high performing technology (resource hog), but there isn't a great alternative.

Why should C/SQL/.. should even be considered to "refuse to die"? So many technologies depend on them that makes the idea ridiculous.

The mention of C was pretty clearly positioned as being about application development, as opposed to system programming and compiler development. The fact a lot of technologies depend on system programming and compiler development is beside the point.

As for SQL . . . it is beset on all sides by people who (rightly) gripe about its flaws, and there are competing technologies intended to replace it, but none of them really fill the void SQL would leave. That could be seen as a perfectly reasonable take on a technology that "refuses to die", because there's so much desire to kill it.

Java's a little harder to swallow as something included in this list. I disagree that "there isn't a great alternative", at least in purely technical terms, but there aren't any credible efforts to replace the JVM across the board (.NET is very platform-specific, on a platform where the JVM never gained the same traction it has elsewhere).

It is about long used technologies that we are so dependent on, that it'll take a very long time to switch to something better (once it comes along).

This really doesn't make a lot of sense, how can dev tech "die" if there is nothing to replace it. I might agree if there were alternatives for some of these, but since there aren't then saying that they "refuse to die" is ridiculous since they cannot die unless/until there is an alternative.

If an environment dies, the critter dependent on that environment dies. That is the source of a lot of the extinction of species in the world; loss of the environment that sustained a species, rather than replacement by a competing species.

The same can apply to development technologies. While some languages would make the jump, for instance, if Oracle had won its case against Google and gone on to win further Pyrrhic "victories" in the courts against other people using Java technologies, it might have succeeded in killing the JVM platform, thus wiping out whole ecosystems of languages dependent on the JVM, even where there is no strict replacement for those languages elsewhere.

Perhaps sean.marmot is on to something. How about a one for one replacement suggestion or possibility for each of these technologies. Might not only be fun but informational.

As another commenter pointed out, it isn't a list of "legacy" stuff (though most on it are) or things that are well past their prime, but things that are so firmly entrenched they aren't going away any time soon, if ever in our lifetimes.

It is a badge of honor to be on this list, not an insult.

J.Ja

I've been in that category for years!

Funniest comment I've read in quite a while. Well played, sir!

The human race has long been on the "refuse to die" category. Is there no honor in that?

If I had to guess, I'd say they were included just because they've been around for a long time. While I agree it's kind of a strange list, with items in it that should require some convincing arguments for their inclusion -- but lack those arguments -- I also think that your comment is pretty nearly contentless and doesn't serve any particularly useful purpose here. All it seems to do is raise the temperature level of the discussion.

It says they refuse to die. It means they WON'T go away. How much simpler could that be?

And don't forget, Android apps are written in Java...

RPG has been around for decades and probably will stay for a very long time

The fax machine. This standard piece of completely outdated technology with its attendant protocol was predicted to die 2 decades ago, yet it persists. Although alternative technologies have been in place and in use during the last two decades, problems continue to trouble the alternatives while the venerable fax protocols continue to chug along, and chug along.

The one thing that could ultimately destroy the fax machine's hold on the world is fax software that doesn't suck. Nobody's rushing to write such software, though; the people writing fax software are (often intentionally) making it suck quite a lot.

I wouldn't call it *development* software, though.

At our office we have this copier that scans and sends you a pdf by email. It's like the killer app. Every single person understands it with no training. People scan dozens, maybe hundreds of documents per month. Once someone figures out you can "fax" someone by scanning then emailing, they reduce their use of the fax machine (saving money on the fax line). It doesn't eliminate the fax - because it's difficult to route faxes through mailboxes in a timely manner - but it transformed how people dealt with documents. Every office should invest in getting a copier that can email faxes to the office staff.

The killer app would be the one that eliminated all that paper your co-workers are scanning.

You missed one of the oldest languages out there. BAL Assembler! It's still actively in use though not so much in the application space any more. d3c5e3e240c7d640d9c5e3d9d640d4c1d55a.

..and all it's flavors. dBase, Clipper, Foxpro, Visual Foxpro. All still around .

Visual FoxPro holds a place near and dear to the hearts of many IT departments. It remains a very strong language that plays nicely with external databases and the internet. Companies that have entrenched VFP applications have a hard time justifying replacing it with a different architecture because there is just not much it can't do.

Where is PERL. This language is having low adoption but still used with document handling and reporting

.... and don't you just love those "regular expressions" !!!

and COBOL too ? Probably trhe best language for main frame batch and online applications in big enterprises