The death of languages

I was reading this BBC article about the Death of Language. The heading reads: “An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?”

The most interesting part for me was:
"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.
"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."

I could not help wondering if it is the same thing with programming languages. They are definitely a product of their time and a specific culture/idea for which they were developed. They have been evolving over time like any other language. I wonder what we would loose if for instance COBOL was to disappear or maybe something like Prolog.

To some extend, a programming language is there to help solving a specific problem. If there is another programming language which helps you do the same thing better and faster, surely you do not loose much. In a sense, a human language is not that different, it tries to address the communication problem.

Which ever way I turn the ideas around, I think it is both a shame and no big deal if we loose such thing. It is something more tangible than a nostalgia for a world/historical passage of our world. Languages try to address the way we see the world at a point in time. When we loose that language, we loose maybe a dimension of the world we look at. Every language is a compromise to express something. It reflects the choices we make and our priorities. When we have a new language, we may or may not carry this dimension with us and maybe we now are looking at the world only in a certain way and completely missing this other dimension which could have made a big difference in our perception of it.

Of course it is highly impractical to keep all of them and to some extend if everyone was speaking the same language it would be a lot easier. Being a foreigner and all, I cannot help thinking wouldn’t it be a lot easier if everyone would speak English? Or technically I don’t really care which one it is. But then I am fearful of a world limited to only English words. Maybe there is something equivalent to poetry for programming languages, that is an interesting idea. I wonder what that would look like. We know programming can produce visual and audio art. I wonder what poetry could look like. Maybe a requirement for any application should also include artistic element to it.