DOS ain't dead

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3842376/fortran-delphi-rise-in-tiobe-popularity-index.html

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Make DOS great again!
Make Russia small again!

> https://www.infoworld.com/article/3842376/fortran-delphi-rise-in-tiobe-popularity-index.html

> Note that we name these languages dinosaurs, but they have evolved
> over time and are pretty up to date. All of them have new language
> definitions.

Fortran was 1957 and Pascal was 1970. (UCSD Pascal was 1977. Turbo Pascal was 1983. Delphi was 1995.) I wouldn't really equate the two in age, but age is irrelevant. "Formula translation", do mathematical formulas age, get old, break, deprecate??

"I am not young enough to know everything." -- Oscar Wilde

> Check out Fortran 2023,

After 2018 (renamed 2015)? I was never sure if GNU Fortran even supported beyond (parts of) 2003 and 2008. I definitely wouldn't call 1995 ancient. But yes, "modern Fortran" has tons of features. (Fortran 77 is legacy but still intriguing.)

> Delphi 12 (released in 2024),

Apparently some people do cringe at old code from Delphi 7 (2003).

> Ada 2023

2022, I thought. Not sure why they bothered, probably marketing or just experience. 2005 and 2012 were fairly popular.

> and COBOL 2023. We might frown to see these languages being
> in the TIOBE index top 20, but they definitely serve a purpose and
> deserve credit.

Go is #7, Scratch is #12, Rust is #14, Kotlin is #19. There is some hype about those languages. But hype doesn't equate to developers or productivity or longevity. (Phoronix practically has a flamewar every time Rust is mentioned. "Rewrite everything in Rust!" is a running joke.)

If you want to complain about age, Windows NT debuted in 1993, and Linux debuted in 1991. How much code is still shared between those and supported versions? Probably not much.

Marketing and popularity are irrelevant.

"Caveat emptor." I don't know who is worse: shoddy developers who peddle expensive and overwrought wares that will quickly deprecate or customers who demand everything and the kitchen sink for free.

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." -- Oscar Wilde

"A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." -- Alan Perlis

P.S. I still enjoy tinkering in classic Pascal (ISO 7185 from 1983). But I also respect Turbo Pascal (Free Pascal), Extended Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, QuickBASIC (FreeBASIC), ANSI C, REXX, and AWK.

* Why SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle (Nov. 8, 2023)

Strange how legacy code can get almost abandoned, but I think it's naive to think "rewrite everything" or "emulate everything". And there's always the naysayers: "just don't use xyz".

EDIT: This is actually about Fortran support, which is often considered legacy, niche, less important despite rigid standards. (And of course non-standard Python is super popular.)