Dead Programming Languages

ComputerWorld recently posted a list of 10 computer skills that are largely irrelevant when compared to other more popular technologies. Among the list are a handful of programming languages. Some of these I have no experience with while others are ones I'm happy to see go away.

Cobol was popular before my time. I was never taught Cobol and had no reason to learn it. I have a cousin whose career was built on Cobol. Lucky for him he's just shy of retirement and won't have to bother picking up one of the newer programming languages. So I guess I'm not sad to see this one go away.

A took a peek at ColdFusion while being closely involved with active-server pages (ASP). I found the language to be quite limited and doing even simple things seemed to be impossible or required too many hoop jumps. I still see new websites being written in ColdFusion so I'm wondering if this language will be hanging around for a while longer. Too bad. There are better options out there such as PHP.

C was used as a teaching tool for some of my computer science degree courses. However, more advanced courses had me shift to C++ so my experience with C is limited. I'm pretty sure that there's no real reason to use it these days as the alternatives are as powerful yet simpler to use.

Back in my Visual Basic days there was a competing language called PowerBuilder. The PowerBuilder folks seemed to be paid more, but otherwise didn't produce applications that were any more impressive than us Visual Basic types. Of course, I'm biased in that assessment. Doesn't much matter these days as both Visual Basic and PowerBuilder are dead languages.

That's it for my journey down memory lane. Are there any programming languages you're happy / sad to see go?