One example is COBOL which was (and is still being) largely replaced by Java in the business application market and rightly so. Even if you don't like Java, you have to agree that it's a great replacement for COBOL.

Verbose... favored by mediocre programmers... loved by business types... you're right, Java is the new COBOL!

I think you're being harsh on COBOL. Clearly, it is a thriving language that's being kept up-to-date according to the latest trends. Check the out the COBOL Ruby on Rails equivalent, COBOL ON COGS if you don't believe me: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

I've never really understood why verbosity was that big a deal. I could very easily type the code that I write per month in a single day. A bit of extra time typing for a more verbose language has very little effect on my output. I don't know if that's an artifact of the type of code I write (quite algorithmic, so large periods of sitting and thinking followed by a bit of writing), but it's just never seemed much of an issue to me on a practical level.

I care more about the drag verbosity imposes on reading more than the difficulties it causes in writing.

You're right of course that typing speed is largely irrelevant... But there's quite a bit more to managing a large code base than how fast you can type. ;)

Typing does matter to me, but it's only one of the many reasons I favor expressiveness and terseness.

I'm in favor of expressiveness. I'm against terseness.

Why in heck are we all still programming in GD text? Why not program in some sort of hypertext? IDEs have become so automagical and serious text editors so often have features like code folding, we're a good deal of the way there anyhow! Why not have a suitable hypertext format paired with a language, such that it's straightforward to do things like toggle between viewing the code with and without type annotations? Then we could have languages/environments that feel like Ruby/Python but which have all of the type annotations if you want them. (And they are useful for maintenance programming.)

RPG III, Fortran, Cobol, assembler, VB, VBA, ASP.

And no, I am not kidding or making this up.

Pascal. Fortran. Cobol. GW-Basic. Powerbuilder. Befunge.

C#, Visual Basic, Ruby to name a few...

I guess I can understand the first two, but you'd take Java over Ruby? Really?

I agree about Ruby not belonging on that list. If anything my learning of Ruby (and then Rails) soured any remaining interest I had in Java development.

I'd really be interested to know why ramoq thinks Ruby is less suitable than Java.

I'll tell you one thing that absolutely stinks about Java: no collection literals. For all the time one spends in Java (and most other languages) dealing with arrays, lists, and maps, I always have to instantiate an object and manually add the elements to the collection. Heaven forbid you decide to nest one collection in another.

The real question should be, "Why?" Why do you prefer Java over these.