Wassercrats, in Fearing the demise of Perl, brings up a very interesting concept - the comparative living-ness of various programming languages, at least where the Internet is concerned. While I disagree with his jumped-to conclusion, I would put forward that he has stumbled on a useful measure of a language.

In my reply, I defined living-ness to be a composite measure of the following qualities:

• How likely you are to get a job working in that language
• How likely is the language to be supported by the Internet community
• How likely is there prior art to work from
• How likely is there going to be innovation in the language

In his reply, Abigail-II takes the concept a little further and compares 20 languages. The numbers he comes up with track very closely to what I would consider how those 20 languages are doing, living-wise.

• Many languages, especially the ones used in business, are increasing in living-ness.
• A few languages (COBOL, Fortran, etc) are decreasing in living-ness.
• Some are staying relatively steady, especially those used primarily in academia.

Note - living-ness and useful-ness are two mostly-unrelated concepts. But, I think that it is foolish to disregard either concept in favor of the other. Many have said that LISP is the be-all-end-all of programming languages. Yet, the likelihood of gettting a job programming in LISP is ... low. As professionals, we need to take all these factors into account. Even though I consider Perl to be one of the best languages in existence, I'm still open to learning Java, Python, PHP, and even Fortran, if need be. (Need has not yet arisen, but it might!)

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