I write risk analytics software for banks and fund managers. This type of client is extremely conservative - once the system goes in, it's probably going to stay in use for 20 years or more.
Gave a lot of thought to what languages are future-proof and decided to stay away from the whole Microsoft suite after seeing many perfectly OK apps written for Visual Basic having to be scrapped.
In the end I went for C++ for speed, portability and longevity. I'll bet there will still be backwards-compatible C++ compilers in 50 years which means my code will still be usable.
Gave a lot of thought to what languages are future-proof and decided to stay away from the whole Microsoft suite after seeing many perfectly OK apps written for Visual Basic having to be scrapped.
In the end I went for C++ for speed, portability and longevity. I'll bet there will still be backwards-compatible C++ compilers in 50 years which means my code will still be usable.