BASIC is the scripting language used by Microsoft Office. Saying that it powers millions of businesses is probably not an exaggeration.

Pascal, particularly the Delphi/Object Pascal flavor, is also still in widespread use today.

Also Smalltalk is still in wide use; ML is also used; there are even many PL/I applications in use today and IBM continues to give support.

I don't know, I heard somewhere that even the C language is in wide use, still ... ;)

Maybe their definition uses recent popularity or how many new projects are started with it. Under that definition, I think it's pretty safe to call it "dead".

If you redefine language, anything is possible.

Yes. "Dead" normally means "to be devoid of life," but it's often extended to metaphorically cover things like computer languages.

edit: for ancient Greek to become a dead language, will we be required to burn all of the books that were written in it, or can we just settle for not writing any new ones?

For ancient Greek all you need is no one speaking it (using it in real life)

Same with a programming language - is no one is wiring code in it, it's dead

No one's starting new projects in COBOL.

One of the most significant new COBOL projects in 2025 was the integration of a new COBOL front-end into the GNU Compiler Collection. There are indeed quite many new projects being started in COBOL, though they primarily focus on modernization and integration with contemporary technologies rather than traditional greenfield development. Also not forget some cloud providers now offer "COBOL as a service" (see e.g. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/m2/latest/userguide/what-is-m2.h...).

By "new COBOL projects" I mean green-field development of entirely new projects written in that language - not the continued development of existing COBOL codebases, or development of tools which interact with COBOL code.

As an aside, the article you linked to is pretty obvious AI slop, even aside from the image ("blockchin infarsucture" and all). Some of the details, like claims that MIT is offering COBOL programming classes or that banks are using COBOL to automatically process blockchain loan agreements, appear to be entirely fabricated.

(Rochus edited their post after I replied to it; the article I was referring to was https://zmainframes.com/zlog/cobol-modernization-in-2025-bre....)

> There are indeed quite many new projects being started in COBOL

No.

You have to put this relative to projects started in other languages, at which points new projects started in COBOL is even less than a rounding error, it probably wouldn't result in anything other than 0 with a float.

The claim was "No one's starting new projects in COBOL."

And everyone of good faith understood what the claim actually was.

And everyone with relevant fintech project experience knows that new projects on the existing core banking systems are started all the time and that COBOL continues to be a relevant language (whether we like it or not).