Keeping programming knowledge alive
I’ve read a few articles about spoken languages across the globe fading to non-existance because no one speaks them any more and they get forgotten.
“More than half of the word’s 7000 languages are endangered, because they consist of an unsustainably small – and declining – speaker base.” – New Scientist
On a much less epic scale, I’m concerned about my own knowledge of programming languages fading to nothing from lack of use. The best example for me is Perl.
Perl is the first server-side programming language I tried to learn to improve my websites. I made very basic guestbook scripts and that was about it, but I did (for a short time) know the syntax and some basic principles in the language. I’ve not used Perl for 5 years!
I started looking into PHP, and never looked back. So what do I remember of Perl now? Hardly anything at all.
With a few years of self-taught PHP under my belt, I’m now pushing slowly into ASP.NET. This time, I’m going to keep my PHP very much alive.