For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and …

> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...

> I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP) It's been ages since I've last seen Delphi in real life - must be over 20 years ago by now. But I'd not put PHP in the same league of "dead and bad" with it... yes, it's not the "hipster" language these days, that's been taken over by <insert JS framework of the day> in frontend, NodeJS in the backend and Go for "need to quickly cobble something together"... but it still powers dominant parts of the web. Obviously Wordpress, Typo3 and Drupal in the CMS area which power a large amount of individual websites, and then the large behemoths Facebook, Wikipedia and Fandom/Wikia.

Delphi is a funny one. Delphi applications certainly have a certain feel (and often instability) with them, but thanks to everything being a website now, they're incredibly fast and responsive compared to what we have now. Sure, they don't do fancy transitions and they look like someone wrote a Windows 8 theme for Windows 95, but when they work, they work.

I toyed with Lazarus a bit and I honestly think it's insane it's not more popular. Instant build times for GUI. You want to add a plugin? Press one button to recompile the entire IDE. You can recompile the IDE from GTK to Qt. With one button. I think I'd prefer it over Qt Creator, for example, for building GUIs on Linux. The catch? I don't know Pascal, and there is no way to learn it. There are so many versions of Pascal that every tutorial you find will be about a different version. The GUI tutorials are for Borland Delphi, not Lazarus. There is no documentation or recipes for doing basic things, e.g. if you want to make a simple to do list CRUD that adds items to a list, you have no idea which widget is the correct list widget. Normally in this case you have a model-view list and a string list. Doing anything with lists that have columns is often a confusing nightmare, but and it becom…

I have had plenty fun and made good money writing KiXtart, VBScript, a variety of outdated shells and niche product specific DSLs etc etc. Also had great fun reversing VB6, and remember there was a wonderful VB6 decompiler from Russia with which I spent more hours than I care to admit. Beauty in languages or tool chains is one thing, but the satisfaction of solving an issue for someone within some weird constraints for whatever reasons is real.

I'll add a number 4: 5. Poor coding practices can produce unmaintainable code in any language. The pain of the maintenance programmer is caused by the implementation programmer, not the implementation language.

Absolutely agree. Software development is, in real-life, a means to an end. A tool first and foremost. VB6 and its excellent tooling allowed many to develop high quality tools and solutions which got the job done. VB6 was accessible, and well supported. Too bad it’s no longer around.

I will disagree with this list, in part. And I am thinking specifically of PHP. I am an emigrate from PHP ecosystem, I departed from PHP 11 years ago and never looked back. The number one reason that I left PHP is that #1 in your list was plainly false. There were _not_ high paying jobs in PHP, no matter how good you were or not. The whole point of using PHP is to pay as little as possible; and make developers as fungible as possible. And if a certain demographic yielded good quality developers for an even lower price point, I would certainly see whole teams being replaced to fit it. I was actually recruited, more than once, exactly for this reason. Languages don't die, they ride into the sunset. There is enough inertia in PHP-ecosystem that you can still find jobs, but they are very often just legacy work jobs (at least in my area). No serious technical leader would pick PHP to execute …