Programming Language Longevity

computer languages evolve so fast? all languages used today are at least 10 years old

are there any 10+ year old languages that are "advancing" as quickly as JS? Ruby? Python? C++?Why Not?

Not everything newer than COBOL is a fad. Python or Java will still be written many years from now. Maybe not 50 years from now but some languages will not go away anytime soon.

Programming languages from 2000 remain, though. C, C++, Java, JS, Python, etc. Even Fortran, Cobol and Lisp remain in use. There’s been attempts since the 80s to popularize visual and and higher level approaches to programming, but the traditional languages still dominate. And the newer ones like Go, Elixir and Julia are like the traditional C, Lisp and Fortrans.

Different decades have different applications, hardware and trade-offs. So popular languages could be just overfit to the current epoch. It doesn't mean there is always progress, could be just change.

The old C/C++ and other code in popular languages is forever with us. Look at what happened to COBOL, it's still relevant and IMO, will be relevant in 20 years.

Why you talk first about C#/Java and then language of last decade? Both of those languages are >2 decades old.I think it's very naive to think that COBOL will outlive Java or C#. Their presence is so huge. I bet that even Rust and Go will outlive COBOL, but I'm not so sure about Go.

There's no next big language :]

I'm sure that in the late 70's or early 80's people said the same thing about assembly language and guess what, even today there are still people programming in assembly. The point is that languages change faster than the platforms they run on. Why else would there be CoffeeScript or Haxe? It's just a natural evolution. To us Javascript might seem perfectly acceptable as a programming language but only time will tell if the next generation of programmers will feel the same about that.

Wait you mean Rust and Go aren't going to be around 30 years from now?!