A lot of programmers know Java and C. Many others know Python and C++. Then there is also this guy called Go – yes, the language – and he’s actually pretty awesome. What I like about him is that unlike his peers (i.e. Java and C++) he has no virtual machine (VM) to build your code on top of; instead, your code produces executables directly (which makes them faster). But this is not enough.
There are other new programming languages that should be taken into consideration: Kotlin, Elixir, Rust and Swift. Since we’re talking about future possibilities, we can’t just put all these languages in the same category. So here we go:
AMPL
Short for A Mathematical Programming Language, AMPL saw its inception as an algebraic modeling language in the Bell Laboratories during the early 90s. It aims at solving large-scale optimization and scheduling-type problems and gives developers the ability to program in numerous paradigms, including linear, quadratic, nonlinear, and second-order cone programming.
AMPL is a cross-platform programming language that was influenced by C and AWK. Games like Wolfenstein and The Evil Within utilizes this language for solving numerous boundary problems.
Clipper
A powerful general-purpose programming language, Clipper was initially developed for solving database problems under the MS-DOS platform. It quickly gained traction for solving complex computational problems that include game programming. Clipper was used in building the first game engine to feature the MegaTexture technology and fueled games like Rage and Wolfenstein.
ELIXIR
“There was this subset of the Ruby community that wandered down the Erlang rabbit hole, and they came out with Elixir,” Rogers said.
Elixir, however, is easier to write than Erlang, with the functional programming concepts of a language like Haskell. Elixir runs on the Erland virtual machine, which works well for low-latency distributed systems. The platform prioritizes scalability and fault tolerance. Lightweight threads of events, or processes, send messages to each other. Those processes can run concurrently, maximizing machine resources and making it easier to scale vertically or horizontally. If something goes wrong, the platform shows the developer the last known state that’s sure to work.Find out who’s hiring.See all Developer + Engineer jobs at top tech companies & startupsVIEW JOBS
ELM
Elm is a functional language for building web applications. It works well for problems that involve a lot of domain-specific rules, like complicated user interfaces, because the developer can model those rules right in the program through Elm’s fast and expressive type system, Kearns said.
Other Elm advantages: The type system is constrained so that invalid data can’t be expressed. That means developers spend less time thinking about potential edge cases. Elm is also known for having no runtime exceptions. Programmers have to tell the program what it should do if the data they defined isn’t present or valid. If anything is missing or broken, the compiler helps developers identify the chunk of code that caused the problem.
“Elm was designed to be 100 percent typesafe. It’s not 90 percent typesafe,” Kearns said. “I think that that’s what really frustrates people with Elm when they’re considering using it professionally. But it’s also what makes people fall in love with it.”
(For more information on Elm, check out Kearns’ podcast, Elm Radio.)
PURESCRIPT
PureScript is a purely-functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript. Most comparable to Haskell, PureScript is best used for developing web applications and server-side apps. Like Haskell, it uses algebraic data types, pattern matching and type classes.
PureScript’s types are expressive and support type inference, meaning that it requires far fewer explicit type annotations than other languages. One of its biggest strengths is its interoperability with other languages that target JavaScript.
SWIFT
Swift is a general-purpose compiled programming language developed by Apple that allows developers to write software for phones, servers, desktops or really anything else that runs on code.
Originally developed as a replacement for Apple’s earlier programming language, Objective-C, Swift combines ideas from other languages like Objective-C, Rust, Ruby and Python to help reduce common programming errors.
The language combines a powerful type inference with a modernized syntax that helps ideas to be clearly expressed through code.
Procedural Languages
GO
Go is a C-style language created by engineering leads at Google. Sleeker than C++ or Java and more typesafe than Ruby or Python, Go comes with benefits and drawbacks.
Some drawbacks: Typing is strict. You can’t mix signed and unsigned integers, or integer sizes. Go also has some noticeable omissions: There are no generics and no inheritance. And if curly braces instead of parentheses makes your blood boil — walk away now.
But Go’s simplicity creates some marked advantages. Namely, the language is easy to use. There’s less hiding behind the written code, and the lack of inheritance helps developers avoid webs of dependencies. Tight definitions and thread safety seem to be Go priorities, Rogers said.
GoLang was designed at Google, by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson in 2007 and released as an open-source programming language in 2009.
It is an excellent low-level language that has a lot of similarities in terms of features with C and C++ but because of the absence of those complicated syntaxes as present in them, Go is quite easy to learn.
It is a perfect language when it comes to building web servers, data pipelines, and even machine-learning apps. However, there are Some disadvantages: Signed and unsigned numbers, as well as integer sizes, cannot be mixed.
There are no generics or inheritance. Also, you need to use curly brackets instead of parenthesis.
Object-Oriented Languages
DART
Another C-style language from Google, Dart is like JavaScript with type safety. It can easily compile to JavaScript, Java for Android, native machine code or a standalone Dart VM. It can also run back-end code.
Dart is good for building user interfaces with event-driven code. The hot reload command lets developers see changes to their applications instantaneously.
Some other Dart advantages, according to one Dart team member: optional static types, minimal compile-time errors and a strong, built-in editor.
PONY
Pony is a language based on data-race-free typing and garbage collection, and uses the actor model as well as something called reference capabilities.
Reference capabilities compel the programmer to label pieces of data as mutable, immutable or isolated. If data is mutable, the compiler doesn’t allow the programmer to exchange the data between actors — when two actors access mutable data at the same time, they may make contradictory updates, or the data could get corrupted. Reference capabilities keep data safe and eliminate the need for locks to prevent concurrent data updates. With no locks, concurrent programs run faster.
Down-sides to Pony are low API stability, few high-quality third-party libraries and limited native tooling.
TYPESCRIPT
TypeScript is an open-source static type system built on top of JavaScript and maintained by Microsoft. So, it’s JavaScript, but with fewer ways to mess up. The TypeScript compiler checks for type mismatches and doles out compile-time errors to prevent run-time bugs.
TypeScript is an open-source programming language developed in 2012 by Microsoft based on JavaScript, one of the world’s most widely used tools. So it’s similar to JavaScript, but with fewer chances to go wrong.
To prevent run-time defects, the TypeScript compiler looks for type incompatibilities and issues compile-time errors. It is an object-oriented language, developed to increase the potential of JavaScript.This language makes it simple for developers to write and maintain code.
For Java users, TypeScript may look especially familiar.
“If you’re glancing at TypeScript — or looking at Angular code, which is all written in TypeScript — the code reads like Java 8. It just needed some annotations and some types, and look! It’s Java,” Rogers said.
(By the way, if you’re considering PureScript as an alternative to TypeScript or JavaScript, just learn Clojure, Rogers advised.)
HACK
Hack is a programming language for the HipHop Virtual Machine as a dialect of PHP. Created by Facebook in 2014, Hack allows for programmers to use both static and dynamic typing (also called gradual typing), which gives them flexibility in their coding.
Some of Hack’s most impressive features are its fast development cycle and its type checking. Hack can reconcile the development cycle of a dynamic typed language like a static typed language, but with many features found in other modern languages. It also provinces instantaneous type checking and runs in less than 200 milliseconds.
JULIA
Julia is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that can be used to write virtually any application, though many of its features lend it to being useful for computational science and numerical analysis. Julia is known for being a high-performance language that is dynamically typed and reproducible.
Julia has a plethora of real world uses in everything from data visualization to machine learning. In fact, it’s used by British insurer Aviva for risk calculations, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for financial modeling and even the Climate Modeling Alliance for climate change modeling. It’s functional interfaces for Fortran, C++, R, Java, C and Python make it one of the most highly sought after new languages to learn.
KOTLIN
It is amongst the most well-designed programming languages. And that is because it has been designed by JetBrains who requires a very little introduction as they are masters in delivering tools to write clean, efficient, and sleek code.
Android app development, web application development, desktop application development all can be built by Kotlin. Kotlin can be described as a quicker, lighter, and more elegant version of JAVA.
Previously, Android development could only be done with JAVA, but since Kotlin’s release, it has become the language of choice for this task as it has less code duplication, fewer null pointer errors, and compatibility with Java, according to the Android developer site.
Do you know the best part about this language – It remained in beta for six years, and was constantly improving during that time. Many important features were introduced during that period and yet they were removed in the first final version of this language as the parent company realized during the beta phase that those features did more harm than good.
Kotlin is a faster, sleeker version of Java that runs in the Java Virtual Machine. It’s now the preferred language for Android development. According to Android’s developer site, its programmers switched to a Kotlin-first approach because the language comes with less boilerplate code, fewer null pointer exceptions and interoperability with Java.
Kotlin is useful for applications that run on both iOS and Android, programs that don’t use additional runtime or virtual machines, and server-side applications.
Conclusion
These are the new programming languages, that are being used today by today’s most innovative companies.
These are the future programming languages that will be used by developers to create the technology, operating systems, mobile apps and internet of things devices.