The Hundred-Year Language

About the article called "The Hundred-Year Language" by Paul Graham, I can say that I found the author's observations very realistic, even though they are only assumptions. One of the statements that seemed important to me is that it says that "like species, languages ​​will form evolutionary trees, with dead ends branching off all over".

On the other hand, it is not surprising that the author considers Cobol as "an evolutionary dead-end-- to Neanderthal language." Since in spite of the fact that in his times it is said that it was a very popular language, it does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. I have heard that Cobol continues to be used but in a very forced way, it is used in systems that do not have the necessary flexibility to evolve, as it is in the case of some banks.

I found it quite consistent what the author says about Java, which predicts that the same thing will happen to Cobol, which will become to an evolutionary dead-end. And although many people may disagree, the reality is that if we compare Java with other languages, it is not as friendly or as flexible as other languages. And in my opinion, maybe it will continue to be used for many more years but in the same way as with Cobol, only in systems with many difficulties to evolve.

Something that did not make much sense to me is the objective of the author's article, because it says that "The reason I want to know what languages ​​will be like in a hundred years is that I know what branch of the tree to bet on now", and although I think it would be very good to learn a language that is a pioneer of the languages ​​of the future, I also think that maybe it would not be very useful, mainly because the because the people interested are those who want to make languages ​​or compilers. Also because normally programmers do not learn a language because it is good in its mathematical bases, but we learn it because it is one of the most used or because it is what is needed in the company in which we work.