There are some things in this makeuseof.com article on "Programming Languages That Are Heading for Extinction" that are no surprise, and others that are just plain wrong.

For example, FORTRAN (intended for numeric computation and scientific computing) and PASCAL (designed as a teaching language, intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring) serve very little purpose nowadays. Modern programming languages are not primarily imperative in nature, and people need languages supporting modern and efficient concepts like object orientation and functional programming. Both FORTRAN and PASCAL are very old, and their extinction is no loss to the world.

COBOL is also very old, and although, since an update in 2002, it supports object orientation, it has some serious limitations (such as the lack of a large library of standard functions, and the very large number of reserved words). It was widely used by financial institutions, whose unwillingness to invest in porting their code to new languages has kept COBOL alive this long. It has become increasingly difficult and expensive for those financial institutions to get skilled COBOL programmers to maintain their legacy code. It is way past time that COBOL was put out of its (and our) misery.

I consider Visual Basic and Visual Basic Applications to be evidence of Microsoft's long effort to sabotage the world of software (both development and use), and few will mourn their passing.

Which brings us to Perl, which is widely used in web development, where it is used for server-side scripting (if you want to access a database on the web-server, you absolutely need server-side scripting). It can be used for a range of programming styles (imperative, functional and object oriented, for example). There is a vast array of free Perl modules to perform almost every imaginable task. Perl has been to a significant extent been supplanted by PHP. 80% of web-servers run on Linux, which means that the main choices for server-side scripting are Perl, PHP and Java (there are other options).

The article states that the downside of Perl is "higher CPU usage and memory requirements". I use Perl extensively on this web-site, and my experience contradicts this criticism. Perl performs at least 10 times better than PHP in terms of speed, CPU and memory usage. The resources used by Perl on this web-server are immeasurably small, whereas I found the CPU load from PHP was close to 100%. In addition, I consider PHP to have some serious security flaws. PHP is now banned on my web-hosting service because of its resource usage and security issues.

So, thanks to makeuseof.com for the article, but get your facts right!