5 new programming languages in the past 6 years

Technology is changing the world as well as itself. Today, we use computer programming in almost everything; household, agriculture, health, entertainment, defense, communication, banking, etc. Programming languages are expanding more and more, due to the fact that we’re “exploring” new products.

Programming languages in general, with different or similar purposes, are competing among each other in the tech world. This makes us wonder which one will be kicked out during the race and who will be moving forward and keep on growing? Why are Rust, Swift or Go more popular than others? Are there new languages that will appear and replace them soon?

Let’s have a look at the list below to know how programming language has changed during the past 6 years (2009–2015).

Programming languages

2015 — Rust (Mozilla)

• It first appeared in 2010 but the first stable Rust 1.0 was released in May 2015 and the newest version 1.10 was released in July 2016.
• Rust was the third most loved programming language in 2015 and jumped to the 1st place for “most loved programming language of 2016” in the Stack Overflow annual survey.
• Rust is well known as a new systems programming language which mainly focuses on safety, speed, and concurrency. In fact, it could be understood as a programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
• Rust has very similar syntax with C++, complete with curly brackets, keyword-based control flow but Rust does not support all C and C++ keywords and uses own keywords which are not found in C or C++, such as match and switch.
• Rust is implemented in Rust, which means that to build a copy of Rust, you need a copy of Rust.

Rust became the favourite programming language for many developers. Many believe it’s more powerful compared to others due to the fact that it has “really powerful abstractions, no null, no segfaults, no leaks, yet C-like performance and control over memory” or because it is “more approachable, safer and often more productive”.

Day by day, Rust’s popularity is increasing but as it’s very young it makes us wonder whether it will still be that popular in the upcoming years.

2014 — Swift (Apple)

• First appeared on June 2014 and Swift 1.1 was released in October 2014 and the latest version was released in May 2016.
• Swift won the first place for “most loved programming language” in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2014 and second place in 2016
• Swift gained a top 20 spot in the The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2015
• Swift was described as “drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU” which means it combines many of the benefits of modern dynamic languages (for iOS, OS X, watchOS and Linux) with the benefits of a strong type system, in a language that produces fast code.
• Swift feels familiar to Objective-C but many developers said that Swift is cleaner and more readable than Objective-C
• Swift also adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier and more flexible

Swift did not only become famous because it comes from Apple, it also has huge advantages compared to other programming languages; mainly due to its dramatically cleaner syntax and its less low-level juggling of pointers. In 2014, Swift was forecasted as one of the most important programming languages that would define the future of coding.

2012 — Julia (Jeff Bezanson & Stefan Karpinski)

First appeared in 2012 and the latest version 0.4.6 / 0.3.12 was released in June 2016.

• Julia is defined as “a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library…”
• Julia is largely used in finance services, asset management firms, insurance companies and investment banks firm and helps to avoid rewriting the code as in Java or C++.
• Julia can produce native code on different platforms and it is fast. Julia is simple to work with and reasonably simple enough that people who might not have much experience programming could be able to walk their way into it easily. It is expressive and powerful without putting your mind down with a bunch of syntax and idioms to remember.

Julia is still quite young and malleable and in 2012 was highlighted as a programming language that was destined to make a major impact in the future.

2011 — Dart (Lars Bak, Kasper Lund & Google)

• Was unveiled in 2011 and its new version was released last April 2016.
• Dart is designed to make it easy to write development tools for well-suited to modern app development, and capable of high-performance implementations. It is used to build web, server and mobile applications, and for IoT devices.
• Also Dart adds some few cool stuff as user-defined operator methods with lightweight, readable code and lightweight syntax for anonymous functions which is used a lot in web programming.
• Dart takes out a few features of JavaScript, such as prototypes and the global object and makes it easier to do code completion and refactoring.
• Dart is a full language with its own semantics. Dart has some differences from javascript such as:
• Only true is true
• No undefined, only null
• No automatic type coercion with ==, +, and other operators
• Dart intents to be faster, more regular, and more scalable for programs larger than javascript
• Dart natively supports libraries while JavaScript doesn’t have a native library or module system.

As there was such advantages, in 2011 people were wondering if Dart was going to replace Javascript. However, updates of Google said that they would not be importing Dart — a language that was designed to eventually become the next evolution of JavaScript and that would focus on improving the capabilities of compiling Dart to JavaScript.

“Dart code could also soon be used for microprocessors (like Raspberry Pi) and microcontrollers (like Arduino)”, Hracek said. It was predicted that he future of Dart would be a language designed to be used for advanced Web applications and an alternative to server-side platforms for real-time communications.

2009 — Go (Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson & Google)

• Go was released in 2009 and the version 1.6.2 was released in April 2016.
• Go has enjoyed explosive growth in popularity and took almost four years to stand in the Top 20 by RedMonk firm, Programming Language Rankings: June 2015
• Go or Golang is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It is considered as a great language that is improving fast and that showed it can be used for all project sizes. Moreover it is faster and easier to learn and master, according to developer’s perspective.
• The creator of Go said that it was “an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language”.
• Go is also popular because of Docker. Why? Docker is a container startup which has revolutionized how to build, ship and run applications and is all written in Go Language.

Go language is growing a lot, specially because it is neatly designed and is used by Google, which holds a major influence in the Computer science field. Together with Rust and Swift, Go is considered as a language that will have an important role in the future of coding.

I had a small discussion with Kate Le (our only female developer that is totally passionate about back end and that decided to become a developer when she started to see how technology affects human life) and she believes that the right technologies could bring a lot of value to people. Her favorite programming language so far is Node JS. She loves it for several reasons. First, it’s javascript so every developer can learn it easily. Second, it’s lightweight and efficient. Moreover, it has NPM, a great package manager, making dependency management very easy. By following and updating trends, Kate also feels interested in Swift, Go and Scala due to the power of each. This post did not mention Scala or other great languages because its purpose was to focus on new promising programming languages from 2009–2015.