A couple of things I heard recently got me thinking about the question of the life span of a programming language.

I think it was Andrew Watson, at his recent talk on Modelling for Maintainability, who mentioned that programming languages have historically become obsolete about every 15 years or so. The second comment was in a Software Engineering Radio podcast where the speaker noted that some classes of developer had already moved away from Java to Ruby.

Now Java is still immensly popular, but this anecdotal evidence, coupled with long-term trend figures from the TIOBE Programming Community Index suggest that it is in decline, along with other languages such as C, C++, Perl and Delphi.

I know at least one person who’s made the move from C++ and is now planning to program purely in C# until he retires in 20 years or so but I wonder whether this is a realistic possibility.

Will the pace of change accelerate such that programming languages become obsolete significantly faster? Or, as program sizes increase, will it simply become too expensive to contemplate moving to another language and we’ll be locked into current languages in some sort of QWERTY phenomenon?

Alternatively, will a move to model-driven software development take place that will enable faster obsolescence of programming languages and indeed make programming languages less relevant?

Answers on a postcard…