What programming languages and language features a

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Closed 8 years ago.

It seems there are many 'new' languages around but in reality it seems like most of the popular, non experimental, ones are already in their teens and the truely mainstream are older than most junior programmers. Now I just remembered this obvious fact when I realized even the 'hip' Ruby language is 15 this month (February 1994). While stuff like Haskell, that's in everyones 'to learn' list is even older than that.

Thinking about it the only really new language, in common use, I could think of that's under 10 is C#. But even C# doesn't really have any new features to it, although it has picked up some of the best features of it's predecessors.

So I'm wondering what new languages, and their corresponding new features/ideas are under 10 right now? Anything that's likely to be big 10 years from now? Any new language features to look forward to? Or are we done already???

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Apparently there is nothing really new that isn't a hybrid or refinement. Maybe LOLCODE because it's designed to be absurd above all else, but even stuff like Brainf*ck and WhiteSpace are basically ancient stack based assembly languages.

Have we reached the encyclopedic era of programming languages?

Answer 1

I think the phrasing of the question suggests that there is no innovation, but in fact all that gets revealed in the discussion here is that innovations take decades to make it into the mainstream.

If you'd asked this question about 20 years ago when OO was one of the 'big new things' with C++ and Smalltalk and whatnot, people could just respond that that was just Simula (1967) repackaged. But in 1970, I don't think anyone would have considered objects to be 'a big innovation' rather they would have just been 'an interesting syntactic nicety' in that Simula language. Over time, OO evolved, people recognized how OO is natural for modeling/structing systems, design patterns were found, ... and now today a great many languages just take OO 'for granted'. But it's hard to find any moment in time where people would say 'OO was a great new innovation' because when it was new, no one appreciated its scope of influence on the software engineering field, and by the time its reach was apparent, it was no longer new.

20 years from now maybe all the new/popular languages will have a feature like 'type classes' from today's Haskell (it is a killer feature), but it's already 'too old' by this question's criteria to be an innovation, even though it may be 'the next big thing'.

So yes, I bet there are new things under the sun, probably hundreds, but they're all off in tiny experimental languages and we won't appreciate the novelty until decades later when the best of today's ideas are refined/proven and make their way into the mainstream.

Answer 2

How about F# :). There are also tons of new languages in development by solo developers. Like scala, jruby, groovy, boo etc.

For a language to catch on it really needs big support from a big company, so we will be stuck with what we got for a while. Although Sun and MS are investing heavily in making their platforms (JVM, CLR) more open to these languages. The defaults will be Java and C# for now, but only time can tell.

Answer 3

very much looking forward to Boo.

Boo is an object oriented, statically typed programming language in active development since 2003, which seeks to make use of the Common Language Infrastructure's support for Unicode, internationalization and web applications, while using a Python-inspired syntax1 and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility. Some features of note include type inference, generators, multimethods, optional duck typing, macros, true closures, currying, and First-class functions.

Answer 4

Wikipedia has a nice timeline about the 1st appearance of programming languages - it shows that there are several languages that cam into like in the years 2000+ though I believe these are not widely used languages (yet?).

Answer 5

The AgentSpeak(L) language for programming intelligent agents. It is based on Prolog (which is very old) but there is some very specific features, and it's brand new.

You can check a fully interpreter called Jason.