In today’s modern world, there are so many emerging programming languages that cater to the diverse purposes of the developers. Some of them are used for web development, whereas others work for the creation of native mobile apps, and others can do it all and even something additional.
As more and more innovative technological solutions begin to emerge and transform the world that we know it, more and more people are getting interested in the technologies behind them. The programming language is responsible for enhancing technological development, boosting the technical progress, and change the way humanity is living and working.
If an individual is a programming newbie, then it makes sense, to begin with, simple languages such as Scratch or HTML. But once the grip with the basics is achieved, there is a vast array of languages that one can begin to learn.
Top Emerging Programming Language
There is a reason why programming languages such as PHP, JavaScript, and C# are considered to be so popular. They are just the best at what they perform and continue to be in high demand from the developers. But, there are several other, lesser-known, but equally important programming languages which can provide loads of value to the developers and in turn programming. Below mentioned are a few programming languages which potentially play a significant role in the businesses and continue to do so in upcoming years.
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F#
F# is an open-source, functional-first language. It is popular among the software developers due to its wide-ranging application uses and the active community. F# was launched in 2005 and had been initially available only for Windows, in the form of a Microsoft Research project. But, it can now be easily used across a wide range of platforms or even to generate a JavaScript and GPU code, big data, games, and much more.
According to Stack overflow’s 2018 survey in which programming languages earned the users their highest salaries, the results reflect that the F# users earned almost an average of $74,000 per year, making them, the best-paid developers all over the world.
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OCaml
OCaml is said to be a part of the popular metalanguage family. It first appeared back in the year 1996. OCaml has been pivotal to influence the development of several programming languages, such as F# and Scala. It remains a popular language for several developers even today.
It has been designed with specific emphasis on the aspects of expressiveness and safety. OCaml has an advanced kind of system which helps to catch the mistakes of the developers while writing the programs. It has been favored by the users who work in an environment where speed is of the critical importance and even a single error can cost millions of pounds to the company.
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Apache Groovy
The Apache Groovy is said to be an object-oriented, agile as well as dynamic language which was designed as a companion, and not as a replacement, for Java language. It offers seamless integration along with all the existing Java objects and libraries. It has many features that are similar to Ruby, Smalltalk, Python, and Pero.
Groovy is said to be a Java enhancer because it offers greater flexibility and even provides special features to the applications. The Java-like syntax indicates that it feels natural to the users who have already gained proficiency in Java. Its concise, direct, brief composition allows the developers to create projects in a faster and easier way.
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Ballerina
This language had been developed by an open-source tech provider named WSO2 and released in the year 2017. It is a type-safe, compiled, concurrent programming language. It is designed to be a cloud-first. The specialism of the language is integration and parallel processing. It helps to implement the microservices with reliable messaging, distributed transactions, stream processing, as well as workflows. The language has built-in support for the modern-day web protocols as well as data formats. The developers’ experience has been designed to maintain a proper flow, where the edit, build, debug cycle has been rapid and integrated into the team’s lifecycle toolchain.
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JavaScript
If someone is planning to become a developer, then they need to know how to code in the JavaScript language. According to StackOverflow’s annual survey for the year 2017, almost 62.5 percent of respondents reported have been using this language, thus making it the most popular choice among developers. It was also considered to be the most popular language by several pulled requests on the Github site at the end of the year 2017.
Due to its popularity, one will never be short of potential job positions by having skills in JavaScript. But it’s wise to complement it with other languages also since it’s rare that one may need just a single language, depending upon the organization.
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Python
The machine-learning boom has been fueling the rise of the Python language. Python is a preferred language for developing applications that are based on big data analytics. It is a general-purpose adaptable language which has uses in the areas of web applications, desktop apps as well as network servers too. The code is easy to read, neat and is used to a great extent by Google. There are plenty of uses for this language. Thus learning it is any day very useful.
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Julia
Created by Stefan Karpinski, Jeff Bezanson, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman in the year 2009, Julia is said to be a high-level dynamic programming language. It is ideal for fast numerical functions or analysis. Julia can be used as a remedy to the Python language’s speed issues. The creators had based Julia on the Python language, like its simple syntax or its ability to separate the data and clean it. Still, they altered it so that any code that is created can be compiled immediately.
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Scala
If someone is a frustrated Java user, then Scala may be the solution. It was designed by Martin Odersky in the year 2004. The Scala language is said to be a general-purpose programming language. Here ‘object-oriented features meet functionality’. Scala operates on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) platform. It is compatible with the full class of Java specifications. As compared to Java, Scala provides a cleaner, simpler and more flexible syntax.
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TypeScript
TypeScript rose in popularity during the start of the year 2017 and has still held strong as the year has gone by. It had been reflected in the ranking from the tech publisher RedMonk, gathering 17 points in the Github ranking and overlapped the Erlang and Rust during the first quarter. It is also famously described as ‘ The JavaScript that scales’. The language adds types to all the variables, thus adding a sense of security. One of the greatest advantages is that the developers can take advantage of Angular. This is a framework for making web applications which are written in TypeScript. Although, one does not need to use Typescript, to use Angular.
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R
R provides an open-source software environment for statistical computing.
R had first surfaced during the year 1993. Presently R is gaining much popularity in the wake of the data-driven thinking and occupations. For instance, data mining, statisticians and also scholars. It offers a simple and effective resource to analyze any subsets of data. But sadly it cannot compete with the larger groups such as Hadoop.
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Kotlin
Kotlin is created by a Russian software development company named JetBrains. Kotlin is meant to compile data quickly and run alongside with Java. It is a statically-typed programming language which runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It can be compiled to the other languages such as JavaScript source code. The Kotlin language is presently in use at famous organizations such as Uber, Pinterest, Evernote, and Coursera.
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Swift
Swift was revealed at Apple’s WWDC conference in the year 2014. It was intended as a replacement of the C language for the OSX and the iOS development. It was created to make the development of iOS devices easier and faster. Apple allowed the language to be open-source in December 2015 under an Apache license. This helped it to gain significant popularity in the developer community. Swift – that has similar properties to modern languages such as Ruby and Python – is enjoying a “meteoric” growth since the time of its launch. All the education content and apps for learning to code by Apple Inc. use Swift. Other popular apps like Airbnb, Kayak, and TripAdvisor were also created by using Swift programing language.
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Rust
Developed by Mozilla, the language Rust 1.0 had been released in the year 2014. It is close to some respects of C and C++. Rust is a new programming language that focuses on the aspects of parallelization, performance, and memory safety. By creating a language from scratch and then incorporating the elements from the modern programming languages, the creators of Rust have been able to avoid a lot of “baggage” in terms of backward-compatibility requirements which the traditional languages had to deal with.
Mozilla is said to have invested millions to create Rust to develop a better and safer language for systems programming. The language by itself is incredibly advanced. The developers are already making use of Rust to develop a wide range of software applications, like operating systems, game engines, browser components, file systems and simulation engines for the area of SEO and virtual reality,”
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Go
Go is an open-source language. It is viewed as a faster and easier to use language than the other more established languages like Java and C, from which it is derived. Go is used by many organizations, from the Sound Cloud to BBC to Facebook and the UK government GOV.UK site as well. It is even used by the enterprise software startup du jour, Docker. This language is an attempt to blend the ease of programming by a dynamically typed and interpreted language with the efficiency along with the safety of a statically typed language.
The Go language is becoming increasingly popular for distributed web applications. It is a great option for modern-day systems development.
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Haskell
Haskell is an ‘advanced purely-functional programming language’. The first specifications of the language were published in the early 1990s. It features a type system along with type inference and a ‘lazy evaluation’. It is primarily used within the academia but there are some other examples of it being used in the industry as well. For instance, projects within organizations like BAE Systems, AT&T, Facebook, and even Google have made use of Haskell. In the year 2016, a group has started compiling a 2020 version of the language.
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Clojure
The closure was launched in the year 2009. It is said to be a dialect of the Lisp programming language. Clojure is a general-purpose language that emphasizes on functional programming. It treats the code as data and possesses a macro system, like the other ‘Lisps’. Clojure is successfully used in the industry by many firms such as Puppet Labs, Walmart, and many other software firms.
Conclusion
There are many programming languages out there. But, only some of these can make it big and get used by the giants of the digital industry. As the technologies change and evolve over the years, a need for new and advanced programming languages keeps on evolving. It is for this reason, that a programmer must keep an eye on the emerging programming languages in the programming industry. One can never know which technology and knowledge one might require to be implemented in their next programing language project.
