[drmeister]

I like the term "Eternal Language" - programming languages where if you write code now - you will be able to compile and use that code ten years from now (a software lifecycle eternity). Common Lisp, C, C++, Fortran, (edit: Java) are close to eternal languages. After losing a huge amount of Python 2 code (I wasn't going to rewrite it) I implemented Clasp, a Common Lisp implementation that interoperates with C++ (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git) so that I can write code that will hopefully live longer.

I am one of the few software developers with code that I wrote 27 years ago that is still in active use by thousands of computational chemistry researchers (Leap, a frontend for the computational chemistry molecular dynamics package AMBER, implemented in C).

[chillpenguin]

In the realm of spoken languages, they say for a language to become immortal, it has to die. Latin is the classic example of this. Languages that continue to evolve will continue to "break" so to speak.

In this vein, Standard ML (SML) is truly immortal, because the standard is set and it is "finished".

Just a fun thought!

[pjmlp]

Well, the Vatican keeps updating it. :)

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/la...

[User23]

Common Lisp's extreme extensibility thanks to macros means new features can be added without breaking the standard.

[kazinator]

Firstly, programming languages are always extended when a program is written, because a program consists of new definitions. This is true of SML. Any SML program consists of the language, plus that program's definition of symbols, which effectively create a local SML dialect consisting of standard SML plus the program's vocabulary.

Secondly natural language evolution isn't controlled by people who know what the are doing, or care about language immortality. They sometimes break things just for the heck of it.

Random examples:

- the "great vowel shift" in the development of English: a linguistic buggery that caused what sounds like "a" in just about any language that uses the roman alphabet, to be written using "u".

- random reassignments of meaning. For instance, the concept called "sensitivity" today was connected to the word "sensibility" just around two hundred years ago. That's pretty gratuitous; I could easily live with a branch of English which had kept it the way it was.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I think I've recently read that the amount of Akkadian/Sumerian material is vastly more, than anything the Latin period has produced. Yet almost nobody is able to interpret it, in comparison to Latin.

[hajile]

There's actually been a decent amount of work on SuccessorML to add a few things to the language.

[georgeecollins]

I hope that Rust joins the pantheon of eternal languages. I feel like it has a lot of the advantages of a language like C, but is just more modern and well thought through.

Also, you did not mention Java. I have very old Java code that still works fine.

[oblio]

Java is probably the biggest "eternal" language we have these days. Probably tied with C and C++.

There's <<so much>> Java code churned out that it's unbelievable. Business systems have a ton more code than infrastructure systems.

[bsder]

> I hope that Rust joins the pantheon of eternal languages.

I'm torn about this. On one hand, Rust is so much better than C it is ridiculous and I really hope it does become a language with decade-long longevity.

On the other hand, Rust is the first new "systems programming" language in forever and is finally prying the door open to something other than C/C++. I'm really hoping that Rust opening the door and paving the way means that now we can get something better.

What worries me about Rust is the impedance mismatch down at the very primitive hardware level--bytes and registers. The embedded guys are doing an amazing job papering over it, but the abstractions leak through quite a lot and you have to twist things around to satisfy them.

The problem is: that's a lot of fiddly code with all kinds of corner cases. So, you either have a lot of work or you throw up your hands and invoke C (like Zig does).

[uoaei]

I'd give it another 2-5 years before the syntax settles. Some serious improvements have recently been pushed out and I wouldn't be surprised if further improvements are on the horizon.

[ahohokla]

I'd like it to be so, but i dont have faith for it. rust doesnt have a standard like lisp/c/c++ and it stands to those languages for their eternality, and at least with lisp and C their relative simplicity makes all the difference for something like that. they feel like, despite how opposite they are, discoveries rather than inventions when compared to something so complex like rust and c++

[pharmakom]

I don’t think Rust will (at least not in current form). It’s breaking too much ground in the (real world) PL-design space. We just don’t know what really work yet!

[xapata]

Java is younger than Python.

[Ginden]

> programming languages where if you write code now - you will be able to compile and use that code ten years from now (a software lifecycle eternity)

Fun fact: code written in JavaScript in 1995 will work in 2021, after 26 years.

If you are talking about "good practices" - few weeks ago I worked with C code from 2001 and it was just awful. Yes, it compiles - but it wouldn't pass any modern code review.

[musicale]

> Fun fact: code written in JavaScript in 1995 will work in 2021, after 26 years.

Sure, as long as you run it in Netscape Navigator 2.0.

In 2021 you're lucky if a JavaScript web app that worked fine on Tuesday still works on Wednesday. And shocked if it works in any browser other than Chrome.

[kazinator]

Ah, but code written in Common Lisp in 2021 will usually work in 1995, after -26 years.

:)

[koonsolo]

Maybe the C code was just badly written

[hajile]

I was pretty sure that there were some subtle changes in ES5 and ES6 that were technically not backwards compatible (done because very little code depended on those behaviors)

[rmbyrro]

Out of curiosity: would the 1995 JS code pass any modern code review?

[tzs]

I think that to earn the title "Eternal Language" that should have to work in both directions.

If I am an expert in language X and take a solar powered laptop and go spend 10 years living as a hermit in some isolated place while working on some big X program, with no communication with the outside world other than idle non-technical chat with the people of the village I go to monthly to buy supplies, if X is an Eternal Language then

1. My code that I wrote as a hermit should build and run on the outside world's systems,

2. I should still be an expert in the language X, only needing to learn library changes, fashion changes (such as coding style changes), and tooling changes to be ready to take a job as an X programmer at the same level as I had before I became a hermit.

Alternatively, suppose I don't know X but wish to learn it. To earn the title "Eternal Language" I should be able to go into my library and read the "Learning X" book I bought 10 years ago but never got around to reading and that should mostly be equivalent to buying and reading a recently published book on X.

[throwawayapples]

Go is another that strives for backwards compatibility: https://golang.org/doc/go1compat

After seeing the Perl5/6 schism, I was hopeful that the Python devs wouldn't make the same disastrous mistake, but.. the same happened with us with approximately 100k lines of Python 2 code (which we are now in the process of porting to Go and Rust), precisely for this reason.

It's exceedingly difficult to form trust in language developers who are willing to break working, production code in use all over the world for decades over a new unicode type and a few wishlist library items.

[Zababa]

While Go strives for backwards compatibility, it's a bit too young for now at 12 years old, and already had a few changes around packaging and stuff like that. If we get to 20 years without Go 2 that will be a solid signal on the longevity of Go.

[nikki93]

One of the newer (newer than C, C++, Common Lisp, ...) languages I feel comfortable about regarding this is Go. Definitely feels like I can write a simple Go program to generate a static website for example and it'll probably still work in that same state for a while.

[exdsq]

It’s hard to say with any 1.x versions what’ll happen come 2.x

[41b696ef1113]

Maybe Lua? Started in 1993 and LuaJIT is effectively frozen. I could see this one hanging in for a long time as the goto embedded language.

[happy-dude]

Interestingly, Perl doesn't get a lot of love on HackerNews but I would classify it in the family of "eternal languages."

[throwawayapples]

Even after the Perl 5 / Perl 6 / Raku debacle? Many developers left after that (Python pulled off the same trick a decade later.. apparently some language teams have very short memories.)

[oalders]

Some of that code has been running for a long time. A lot of the Perl toolchain still works on 5.8.1 (released Sept 2003).

https://metacpan.org/release/JHI/perl-5.8.1

Test::Simple still targets 5.6.2, which looks to have been released around the same time (November 2003).

https://metacpan.org/release/RGARCIA/perl-5.6.2

[jjav]

I have quite a bit of personal scripting in perl that I wrote in the early 90s, still in use every week. Haven't changed any of the code in decades.

[duped]

C/C++ languages are stable, but building actual software with them is extremely cumbersome on future systems. It is unlikely to "just work" because of how we have inverted the dependency structure of the vast majority of C/C++ programs.

[forrestthewoods]

Ehhh. Integrating an old C++ library into a new project may be difficult due to build systems or not useful due to dependencies.

However if you want to take an old C++ game written in 2004 and ship it on modern platforms and consoles you only need to update a very small amount of platform specific code.

Updating a 20 year old C++ project is probably easier than updating a 3 year old web app.

[Turing_Machine]

JavaScript probably qualifies, too. It's not going anywhere for a very long time, if ever. Same with COBOL. COBOL will have to be killed with fire.

I'm assuming here that "eternal language" doesn't necessarily mean "good language". :-)

[musicale]

Unfortunately JavaScript code is often built on DOM and NPM quicksand.

[xapata]

How do you lose Python 2 code? The old interpreter still works.

[p_l]

But is no longer viable option for new work, and in this case a lot of the code IIRC was libraries for writing programs.

[jjav]

> "Eternal Language"

Even more than being able to compile and run it in a few decades (which is awesome) there is also the part that such eternal language ecosystems grow excellent tooling (debuggers, tracing, performance analysis, source tooling, build tooling, library maturity, etc) thanks to the stable platform and all the years dedicated to making it all ever better.

I greatly dislike the language of the year hype not so much because the language change itself, but because all the wonderful mature tooling doesn't exist in the new shiny thing so we're back to debugging via print and performance analysis via guesswork.

[lenkite]

The only place LISP is eternal is on HN. A super-microscopic minority of engineers use it for real-world software development. The standard hasn't been updated for 2 decades. There is only one real compiler implementation. No WASM. No proper mobile support. Library support for real world tasks is abysmal.

Common LISP's tomb is indeed shiny and eternal. Developers at HN will mourn at its graveyard for eternity.

[lispm]

> There is only one real compiler implementation

what kind of meaning of 'real' reduces the several compiler implementations to just one?

Example: I use two native code compilers (SBCL and LispWorks) on my Mac. Both are available on other platforms, too. Is one of those not 'real'?

What about, say, ECL or Allegro CL? Are they unreal?

[SCLeo]

I honestly think most languages belong to this category. I can't really think of a language that changed so much that old code no longer works (other than python 2 -> python 3).

[medo-bear]

was it you that said that the difference between writing templates in c++ and writing macros in common lisp is like the difference between filling out tax forms and writing poetry :)