David Amram once said, “Today’s trend ends up in tomorrow’s landfill.”

However, his theory makes more sense in the case of programming language trends where suddenly a 67-year-old language is back in the spotlight after more than a decade, and at the same time, Apple’s Objective-C loses its popularity.

You know, that’s the thing with trends. You might never know what may hit or lose the strike again — especially in the case of programming languages.

No programming language remains in power all the time; they rule for a while and then fade away. While these languages never die, they become outdated depending upon the current demand in the market.

However, while it’s impossible to predict which language will rule or fade away over the next decade, it’s still worth knowing which languages are on a trajectory to oblivion.

Below is a list of five programming languages that are likely to become outdated over the decade:

Game Over for Objective-C

Apple’s 36-year-old Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that serves as the primary programming language for Apple.

Objective-C’s popularity has been constantly declining over the past year, and it has plunged eight ranks on the TIOBE Index Rankings — after finally dropping off the top 20 most popular languages in April.

Plenty of developers prefer Swift and companies nowadays are starting to prioritize hiring Swift technologists rather than Objective-C ones.

Though the language still has some traction in the market, and it probably isn’t going to be outdated anytime soon, you should probably go for Swift rather than Objective-C if you’re looking to work in the macOS or iOS domain.

CoffeeScript Has Lost Its Taste

CoffeeScript is a language that compiles to JavaScript and adds syntactic sugar to improve the readability and brevity of JavaScript.Though CoffeeScript became very popular in a short span, it also lost its charm very quickly.

As per the reports of Google Trends, the language has witnessed a huge decline in its popularity over the last 4–5 years, and if you see the TIOBE ratings of 2021, you won’t find CoffeeScript among the top 100 programming languages.

However, the language isn’t that old to have already earned a place on the list of dying programming languages, since it came into existence in 2009 — but cons like being prone to change and the compilation process has significantly decreased its demand.

Perl Is Fading

Perl was introduced in 1987, and since then has enjoyed a good command over the tech world. But after the development of several other efficient programming languages — especially Python — Perl is finding it difficult to make a strong comeback in the tech market.

Well, there is no doubt that Perl still has its adherents. And every time an article declaring Perl is a dying language rolls out, fans point out the popularity of Perl’s current open jobs, or how it’s still useful in performing many tasks effectively.

But we can’t deny the fact that Perl can’t outrun Python, which currently sits in the second position in TIOBE’s chart. Whereas, Perl has been mostly stuck in the 19th position for the past two years.

And it’s not wrong to say that over the next ten years, the number of folks using Perl will decline still further, putting the language at serious risk of fading away entirely.

VB.NET Is Marked for Death

Microsoft’s Visual Basic .NET was released in 2002; it was created as a successor to the original Visual Basic computer programming language.

Though VB.NET was quite popular for a long time — and has been the favorite child of the family — the language eventually lost its charm with the emergence of C#.

According to Google Trends, VB.NET is losing its charm. According to the TIOBE Index reports, VB.NET has been taken over by C# in terms of demand and popularity.

Due to limited core functionality in VB.NET, many programmers and developers prefer to use C# rather than VB.NET.

Haskell Is on the Verge of Goodbye

Although Haskell has its own fan club, and it was preferred by various big tech companies such as Facebook, GitHub, IBM, etc., the language hasn’t performed well on TIOBE’s long-term language rankings, suggesting that there’s little developer chatter around it.

Haskell is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language. According to March 2020’s TIOBE Index rankings, Haskell came in 39th position — dropping to the 47th this year.

Over the last 8–10 years, the language has shown a consistent decline in its demand and usage because of difficulty in learning, static-typing, etc. And with the new-developing technologies, there are other languages — such as Python — that are gaining more of the developers’ attention.