While its refined expressive syntax and rich collection of data types certainly make it a powerful language for functional programming, these qualities also make coding (and learning to code) in Haskell a somewhat formidable endeavor.ĭespite its impressive technical capacities, a tough learning curve might be enough to ward off newer developers. Like Erlang, its main detractor is its complexity. Haskell is another legacy language that never seemed to attain the strong user community needed to ensure long-term adoption and success. Because of that, there are a lot of developers that might wince at the complexity of its syntax and a conspicuous absence of accessible feature libraries.Īlthough Erlang will certainly remain in use by dedicated devotees long into the future - particularly for large, highly transactional systems - its colloquial heyday might have passed. Newer concurrent languages, such as Elixir, make it a point to simplify these tasks through static typing and data immutability. Unfortunately, the language shows its age a little when it came to tasks like debugging and code maintenance, especially for novice developers. As such, it became a basis for many online messaging apps and financial systems that process thousands of transactions per day.ĭespite its long history, Erlang never gained a large following of users - it isn't even featured on the TIOBE Index of top-50 languages. Erlang gained considerable favor among developers for its ability to field enormous numbers of simultaneous requests, support parallel processing and perform comprehensive garbage collection.

It's a well-respected and battle-tested programming language known for its resiliency, reliability and concurrency. ErlangĮrlang first gained notoriety in the mid-to-late 1980s, and later released to the open source community in 1998. Is it worthwhile to sharpen your skills in these languages and potentially carve out a unique brand of skills for yourself to rely on later in your career? Or is their uncertain future enough of a reason for you to abandon your interest in them? Take a look and decide for yourself. In this piece, we'll look at five languages that may start to see their use become increasingly obscure over the next decade. Just look at legacy languages like COBOL, which still sits at the heart of countless enterprise software systems (including Fortune 500 companies).

There will be plenty of legacy codebases written in these prophetically dead programming languages, and a need for developers with the know-how to understand and maintain them. In no way does that mean these languages will disappear entirely.

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