COBOL
COBOL is the canonical instance of a language that looks like it must be lengthy gone, however lives on inside numerous blue-chip firms. Banks, insurance coverage firms, and comparable entities depend on COBOL for a lot of their enterprise logic. COBOL’s syntax dates to 1959, however there have been critical updates. COBOL-2002 delivered object-oriented extensions, and COBOL-2023 up to date its dealing with of widespread database transactions. GnuCOBOL brings COBOL into the open supply folds, and IDEs like Visible COBOL and isCOBOL make it straightforward to double-check whether or not you’re utilizing COBOL’s historical syntax appropriately.
Perl
Python has changed Perl for a lot of fundamental jobs, like writing system glue code. However for some coders, nothing beats the concise and highly effective syntax of one of many unique scripting languages. Python is simply too wordy, they are saying. The Complete Perl Archive Community (CPAN) is a big repository of greater than 220,000 modules that make dealing with many widespread programming chores a snap. In latest months, Perl has surged within the Tiobe rankings, hitting quantity 10 in September 2025. In fact, this quantity is partially based mostly on search queries for Perl-related books and different merchandise listed on Amazon. The language rankings use search queries as a proxy for curiosity within the language itself.
Ada
Improvement on Ada started within the Nineteen Seventies, when the US Division of Protection got down to create one normal laptop language to unify its large assortment of software program tasks. It was by no means wildly fashionable within the open market, however Ada continues to have a giant following within the protection industries, the place it controls essential techniques. The language has additionally been up to date over time so as to add higher assist for options like object-oriented code in 1995, and contract-based programming in 2012, amongst others. The present normal, known as Ada 2022, embraces new buildings for secure, bug-free parallel operations.
