8 old programming languages developers won’t quit

The computer revolution has always been driven by the new and the next. The hype-mongers have trained us to assume that the latest iteration of ideas will be the next great leap forward. Some, though, are quietly stepping off the hype train. Whereas the steady stream of new programming languages once attracted all the attention, lately it’s more common to find older languages like Ada and C reclaiming their top spots in the popular language indexes. Yes, these rankings are far from perfect, but they’re a good litmus test of the respect some senior (even ancient) programming languages still command.

It’s also not just a fad. Unlike the nostalgia-driven fashion trends that bring back granny dresses or horn-rimmed glasses, there are sound, practical reasons why an older language might be the best solution for a problem.

For one thing, rewriting old code in some shiny new language often introduces more bugs than it fixes. The logic in software doesn’t wear out or rot over time. So why toss away perfectly debugged code just so we can slurp up the latest syntactic sugar? Sure, the hipsters in their cool startups might laugh, but they’ll burn through their seed round in a few quarters, anyway. Meanwhile, the megacorps keep paying real dividends on their piles of old code. Now who’s smarter?

Sticking with older languages doesn’t mean burying our heads in the sand and refusing to adopt modern principles. Many old languages have been updated with newer versions that add modern features. They add a fresh coat of paint by letting you do things like, say, create object-oriented code.

The steady devotion of teams building new versions of old languages means developers don’t need to chase the latest trend or rewrite our code to conform to some language hipster’s fever dream. We can keep our dusty decks running, even while replacing punch-card terminals with our favorite new editors and IDEs.

Here are eight older languages that are still hard at work in the trenches of modern software development.

COBOL

COBOL is the canonical example of a language that seems like it ought to be long gone, but lives on inside countless blue-chip companies. Banks, insurance companies, and similar entities rely on COBOL for much of their business logic. COBOL’s syntax dates to 1959, but there have been serious updates. COBOL-2002 delivered object-oriented extensions, and COBOL-2023 updated its handling of common database transactions. GnuCOBOL brings COBOL into the open source folds, and IDEs like Visual COBOL and isCOBOL make it easy to double-check whether you’re using COBOL’s ancient syntax correctly.

Perl

Python has replaced Perl for many basic jobs, like writing system glue code. But for some coders, nothing beats the concise and powerful syntax of one of the original scripting languages. Python is just too wordy, they say. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a huge repository of more than 220,000 modules that make handling many common programming chores a snap. In recent months, Perl has surged in the Tiobe rankings, hitting number 10 in September 2025. Of course, this number is in part based on search queries for Perl-related books and other products listed on Amazon. The language rankings use search queries as a proxy for interest in the language itself.

Ada

Development on Ada began in the 1970s, when the US Department of Defense set out to create one standard computer language to unify its huge collection of software projects. It was never wildly popular in the open market, but Ada continues to have a big following in the defense industries, where it controls critical systems. The language has also been updated over the years to add better support for features like object-oriented code in 1995, and contract-based programming in 2012, among others. The current standard, called Ada 2022, embraces new structures for stable, bug-free parallel operations.

Fortran

Fortran dates to 1953, when IBM decided it wanted to write software in a more natural way approximating mathematical formulae instead of native machine code. It’s often called the first higher-level language. Today, Fortran remains popular in hard sciences that need to churn through lots of numerical computations like weather forecasts or simulations of fluid dynamics. More modern versions have added object-oriented extensions (2003) and submodules (2008). There are open source versions like GNU Fortran and companies like Intel continue to support their own internal version of the language.

C, C++, etc.

While C itself might not top the list of popular programming languages, that may be because its acolytes are split between variants like plain C, C++, C#, or Objective C. And, if you’re just talking about syntax, some languages like Java are also pretty close to C. With that said, there are significant differences under the hood, and the code is generally not interoperable between C variants. But if this list is meant to honor programming languages that won’t quit, we must note the popularity of the C syntax, which sails on (and on) in so many similar forms.

Visual Basic

The first version of BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was designed to teach school children the magic of for loops and GOSUB (go to subroutine) commands. Microsoft understood that many businesses needed an intuitive way to inject business logic into simple applications. Business users didn’t need to write majestic apps with thousands of classes split into dozens of microservices; they just needed some simple code that would clean up data mistakes or address common use cases. Microsoft created Visual Basic to fill that niche, and today many businesses and small-scale applications continue on in the trenches. VB is still one of the simplest ways to add just a bit of intelligence to a simple application. A few loops and if-then-else statements, just like in the 1960s, but this time backed by the power of the cloud and cloud-hosted services like databases and large language models. That’s still a powerful combination, which is probably why Visual Basic still ranks on the popular language charts.

Pascal

Created by Niklaus Wirth as a teaching language in 1971, Pascal went on to become one of the first great typed languages. But only specific implementations really won over the world. Some old programmers still get teary-eyed when they think about the speed of Turbo Pascal while waiting for some endless React build cycle to finish. Pascal lives on today in many forms, both open source and proprietary. The most prominent version may be Delphi’s compiler, which can target all the major platforms. The impatient among us will love the fact that this old language still comes with the original advertising copy promising that Delphi can “Build apps 5x faster.”

Python

Python is one of the newest languages in this list, with its first public release in 1991. But many die-hard Python developers are forced to maintain older versions of the language. Each new version introduces just enough breaking changes to cause old Python code to fail in some way if you try to run it with the new version. It’s common for developers to set up virtual environments, used to lock-in ancient versions of Python and common libraries. Some of my machines have three or four venvs—like time capsules that let me revisit the time before Covid, or Barack Obama, or even the Y2K bug craze. While Python is relatively young compared to the other languages on this list, the same spirit of devotion to the past lives on in the hearts and minds of Python developers tirelessly supporting old code.