Is -insert a programming language here- dead in 2020?

A very common question that I personally hear around fellow developers, especially those who just started their coding journey is why should I code in XYZ when ABC is the new trend?

Now we all can agree that technology is evolving rapidly and if you are not learning or keeping up, you will basically be left behind so technically a programming language that you would learn right now would be “dead” in few months or years, right?

Well, it depends on several factors as the attribute of an outdated language is different from those of a not so popular language. Take for example PHP, once it was a common backend technology used to write various server-side applications and when combined with MySQL, it powered most of the internet giving us Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia, WordPress and so on. But, with the introduction of modern alternatives such as NodeJS and Django, a number of engineers and companies started to lose interest in PHP and move on with a trendy substitute. Yet many other companies are still looking to hire more PHP developers mainly because their infrastructure was initially built to run and support PHP and it would be uneconomical to switch from PHP to another technology just because everybody is talking about it, that was the exact same situation i faced when I built Swinburne’s course planner in addition to few other projects to support the University’s PVC and research offices. Below is a brief comparison from https://aglowiditsolutions.com/ between PHP and NodeJS.

Many other languages such as ColdFusion, Cobol, Lisp and Objective-C are also labeled dead as almost everybody either forgot about them or was never aware of their existence, but the fact remains that many organizations out there are still running on these legacy systems such as banks, governments, airlines, etc.… and you could secure a 6 figures salary job to maintain one of these old school applications.

In contrast, a language like ALGOL, which was mainly used by scientists and researches was around for just over 10 years from 1958 till 1973. The latest release of this language, ALGOL 68 was not well received by the public as the design was more complex and advanced compared to the cleaned simplified previous version ALGOL 60, therefore it was abandoned and made irrelevant.

When we compare both examples above, you and I can agree that it would be easy to mistake an outdated or a "dying language" to a language that is losing popularity yet still in use within a small community.

I personally do not believe in the phrase -This language is dead-, because every language has its own usage based on the given circumstances and requirements. It would be easy to build an e commerce website in PHP, but it would be a bit hard to code an android app in the same language, you would probably use something like Java or Kotlin. Furthermore, if you are just starting to learn how to code, you should pick a language based on your interest and its ease of usage rather than its popularity because initially you need to understand the fundamentals of writing code so things like variables, loops, conditions and functions are common in every programming language out there.