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.
