Best Programming Languages for the Future
The most important skill to learn in today's world is to know how to write a computer program. The programming and developer community are emerging at a rate faster than ever before.
If you organized programming languages into tiers based on their popularity, they would fall into three tiers. The top tier, second-tier, and third-tier. Most of the languages in the top tier are firmly entrenched. It takes a while for a programming language to fall out of the top tier, and it's very hard for a second-tier language to break into the top tier. The emerging languages are in a third tier, and they are just starting to gain a following. Some languages have been in the third tier for many years, never taking that next step toward popularity, while others have burst onto the scene in just one or two years.
Top tier would include the mainstream languages such as Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, C#, C++, and Objective-C.
Second-tier languages are waiting to break into the mainstream but haven't quite made it. They have proven their worth by building strong communities of support, but they still aren't used by a large number of more conservative software companies. Scala, Go, Swift, Clojure, and Haskell are languages I would put in the second tier. Some companies use these languages in a few services, but wide industry use is rare (except for Swift, which is starting to overtake Objective-C as the primary iOS language). Go and Swift both have a good chance of moving from the second tier to the first over the next two to three years.
Third tier are emerging languages and they are just starting to gain a following. Some languages have been in the third tier for many years, never taking that next step toward popularity, while others have burst onto the scene in just one or two years. Elm, Rust, Kotlin, Crystal and Elixir.
Python
Python is fast, easy to use, easy to deploy and are used to develop scalable web applications. You will find it also in desktop apps, network servers, machine learning, media tools and more.
YouTube, SurveyMonkey are all built in Python.
Python provides excellent library support. The programming language provide a great starting point for beginners.
You might find Python useful for back-end services and API's. If you are in security or Site Reliability Engineering. Python based web development framework like Django, Pyramid and Turbo Gear have found more popularity.
Python as JavaScript (see below) are hot in the startup world. many startups use Django (Python), Flask (Python) and NodeJS (JavaScript) as their back end frameworks.
It is a good choice for beginner developers to learn as it's high level and easy to read.
Java
Java is a popular choice in large organizations and it has remained so for decades. It is a language created by James Gosling from Sun MicroSystems in 1991. Java is widely used for building enterprise-scale web applications. Java is extremely stable and many large enterprises have adopted it.
Java's powerful JVM (Java virtual Machine) makes it cross-platform compatible.
Java is also widely used in Android App Development. Google has created an excellent Java-bases Android development framework - Android Studio. this opens up a huge opportunity for Java developers.
Java and PHP (see below) are hot in the corporate world. Many organisations use Spring (Java) and Codeigniter (PHP) as their web backend framework.
It is vital to frond-end development and increasingly relevant to back-end development. It is rapidly expanding into areas like game development and the IOT (Internet of Things)
There is so many saying that Java will be forgotten after Kotlin (see below). Java has died and resurrected so many times and it is still there.
C/C++
C/C++ is like the bread and butter of programming. Almost all low-level systems such as operating systems, file systems etc are written in C/C++. This is a language for the system-level programmer.
C++ is fast and stable. C++ also provides something called as STL-Standard Template Library. STL is a pool of ready-to-use libraries for various data structures, arithmetic operations, and algorithms.
C/C++ and Golang (see below) are top choices in building low-latency ans scalable systems. Microsoft Windows and Google Chrome are two of the most well-known projects created with C++, and indeed Amazons website are written in C++.
JavaScript
JavaScript is the "frontend" programming language. JavaScript is widely used to design interactive forntend applications. for instance, when you click on a button which opens up a popup, the logic is implemented via JavaScript. It is truly an essential web tool technology alongside HTML and CSS, and because most browsers in some way implement JavaScript.
These days, many organisations, particularly startups, are using NodeJS which is a JavaScript-based-run-time environment. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript for server-side scripting - running scripts server-side to produce dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user's web browser.
Hence now with JS, you can use a single programming language for server side and client side scripts.
Go
Go, also known as Golang, is a programming language built by Google. Go provides excellent support for multi threading. Go provides better features for to write concurrent programs. Concurrent programming in it's simplest form is a program that does several threads/tasks at once. It is being used by a lot of companies that rely heavily on distributed systems. When you have multiple users attempting to access the same resource at the same time there is a lot of problems that can occur. You can have dead locks (consumers are waiting for something the producer will never produce), race conditions (one result clobbers an other result), starvation (the scheduling algorithm makes it such a process that needs to run but never does), etc.
Go is widely used in startups in silicon Valley. It is simple to write like Python but more efficient like C++. It has yet to be adopted by Indian companies/startups.
R
R is one of the most commonly used programming languages for Data Analysis and Machine Learning.
R provides an excellent framework and built-in libraries to develop powerful Machine Learning algorithms. r is also used for general statistical programming as well as graphics.
R and MATLAB (see below) are hot in the analytics world.
Swift
Swift is used to develop iOS applications. It's apple's new language options for programming native iOS and Mac-OS applications.
Native language is a language that can run on the platform without converting it first, or to do anything with it. Native apps have been found to outperform hybrid apps. Hybrid programming languages, also known as multi-paradigm programming languages. Just to mention a few; Python, Java, C++, and Swift are hybrid programming languages.
iOS applications are becoming increasingly popular. Apple iPhone, for instance, has captured a significant market share and is giving a tough competition for Android.
It is a relatively new programming language released in 2014. Swift is a statically typed language which means that XCode checks your errors for you. XCode is the editor for Swift.
PHP
PHP is among the most popular backend programming language. though PHP is facing tough competition from Python and JavaScript, the market still needs a large number of PHP developers.
C#
C# is a general-purpose programming language developed by Microsoft. C# is widely used for backend programming, building games (using Unity), building Window mobile phone apps.
MATLAB
MATLAB is a statistical analysis tool that is used in carious industries for Data Analysis. MATLAB is used widely in the Computer Vision and Image processing industry as well.
Rust
Rust is a new system-level programming language that is changing the way we think about programming. Rust were originally developed by Mozilla foundation and it operates as a low-level language, suited for performance critical code.
Rust is created with the purpose of avoiding the dangling pointers, buffer overflows or any other kind of memory errors.
For a beginner, rust might be a bit of struggle to pick up as it insists on various rules to achieve memory safety.
Rust is a systems programming language meant to replace a lot of C and C++ development—which is why it's surprising to see this language's popularity growing the fastest among web developers.
It makes a little more sense when you find out that the language was created at Mozilla, who is looking to give web developers that are forced to write low-level code a better option that's more performant than PHP, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript. Rust was also crowned the "most loved" technology in StackOverflow's 2016 developer survey (meaning it had the most users who wanted to keep using it).
Rust is a systems programming language that combines C-like efficiency and control over memory with functional language features such as strong static typing and type inference. It has three primary design goals:
Safety: Many C-like languages open the door to memory errors resulting from manual memory management (e.g., dangling pointers or double-frees). Rust takes best practices from modern C++ such as RAII and smart pointers and makes them language requirements, systematically ensuring that pure Rust code is memory-safe.
Speed: Nearly all languages run slower than C because they provide abstractions that make software development easier but with substantial runtime overhead (e.g., garbage collection and dynamic dispatch). Rust focuses on “zero-cost abstractions,” or methods of making programming easier that don’t cost anything at runtime. For example, Rust manages memory at compile time and uses static dispatch for generics (similar to C++ templates, but more type-safe).
Concurrency: Concurrent code in systems languages is often fragile and error-prone, given the tricky nature of programming with threads. Rust tries to alleviate these issues by providing type-level guarantees for what kinds of values can be shared between threads and where.
Rust also has several distinguishing features:
The borrow checker: Rust’s famed feature is a static analysis tool that reads your code and stops compilation if it could cause a memory error. This works by institutionalizing the notion of values being either owned by one place or borrowed by many places and subsequently analyzing how ownership of a value changes over the lifetime of the program. The borrow checker also precludes data races in concurrent code using the same set of rules.
Composition over inheritance: Instead of using an inheritance-based class system such as C++ or Java, Rust uses traits, or composable interfaces, to support modular programming. Rather than specifying that a particular type is part of a class hierarchy, a programmer can describe a type by its capabilities, e.g., saying that a type should be Printable and Hashable instead of inheriting from a PrintableHashable class.
Kotlin
It originated at JetBrains—makers of the popular IntelliJ IDEA IDE. So you know it was crafted with developer productivity in mind. Another major reason Kotlin has a bright future—you can easily build Android apps with it.
Kotlin is a statically typed language that targets the JVM and JavaScript. Kotlin was born out of need at JetBrains, which was looking for a new language in which to write its tooling, which was mostly written in Java. Something that would allow it to leverage its existing codebase and at the same time resolve some of the issues it had with Java.
It was precisely common pitfalls that one encounters when writing software that shaped much of Kotlin’s characteristics.
Conciseness: Reduce the amount of boilerplate code necessary to express certain constructs.
Versatile: Create a language that is suitable for any type of industrial application development, be it web, mobile, desktop, or server-side.
Safe: Let the language handle some of the common pitfalls made with issues such as null reference exceptions.
Interoperable: Permit the language to interoperate with existing Java codebases, libraries, and frameworks, allowing for gradual adoption and leveraging existing investments
Tool-enabled: JetBrains makes tools and it does so out of the belief that many mundane tasks can be automated and lead to more efficient and productive development. As such, the language has to easily allow for tooling.
Kotlin has and will always be about pragmatism—seeing common issues we encounter frequently when writing code and trying to help address these. This surfaces through various language features such as:
Null-safe by default: Kotlin types by default are not nullable, avoiding pesky null reference or pointer exceptions.
First-class delegation: The ability to delegate functionality of a class member to an external function, thus allowing for reuse and better composition.
Conventions: A series of conventions that allow for writing expressive code, giving way to creating a strongly typed domain-specific language that provides better discover ability and easier refactoring.
Fabulous tooling: Any C/C++ veteran knows the pain of installing dependencies, compiling code on multiple platforms, and battling arcane C Make configurations. Rust saves the endless hours spent yelling at GCC by providing a sane package manager and cross-platform-compatible APIs.
Kotlin is originally developed by JetBrains. It is fully inter-operable with Java and comes with no limitations. In 2017 Google announced that Kotlin is the official language for android development. Kotlin works great with all existing Java libraries and frameworks.
Kotlin has been around for about five years, but it finally reached the production-ready version 1.0 this year. Although it hasn't achieved the popularity of Scala, Groovy, or Clojure—the three most popular and mature (non-Java) JVM languages—it has separated itself from the myriad other JVM languages and seems poised to take its place among the leaders of this group.
Kotlin 1.0 was released in February 2016 after more than five years in development and extensive testing in real-world projects. Currently, over ten products at JetBrains use Kotlin, as do companies such as Amex, NBC Digital, Expedia, and Gradle.
TypeScript
TypeScript is a programming language designed for large-scale JavaScript application development.
TypeScript is not just for a front-end developer, it is now used to power back-ends, create hybrid mobile applications, architect cloud solutions, design near networks and even control robots.
The front end deals with the client side. It works with the browser.
Back end development deals with things that must communicate with the server.
On the front end we are primarily concerned with:
HTML (markup language)
CSS (styling language)
JavaScript (programming language that supports scripts)
Front end developers may also work with languages that apply to the backend. For example PHP works with the server and can be used for other types of programming.
TypeScript is now fundamental to core JavaScript frameworks - even google decided to use it in Angular.
F#
F# is originally developed by F# Software Foundation.
F# is most often used as a crossed-platform Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) language, but it can also generate JavaScript and GPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units)
Elm
Elm is a usability-focused functional programming language that compiles to high-performance JavaScript. You can use it with or without JavaScript to build user interfaces on the web. Elm's primary benefits compared to JavaScript are reliability, maintainability, and programmer delight.
More specifically: Elm is becoming popular within the JavaScript community, primarily among those who prefer functional programming, which is on the rise. Like Babel, TypeScript, and Dart, Elm trans-piles to JavaScript.
No runtime exceptions: Production Elm code has a reputation for never throwing runtime exceptions. A far cry from "undefined is not a function."
Legendarily helpful compiler: Elm's compiler is widely praised for having the most helpful error messages in the business. "If it compiles, it typically just works," is a common sentiment, even after a serious refactor. This makes large Elm code bases much nicer to maintain than large JS ones.
Semantic versioning automatically enforced: elm-package enforces semantic versioning automatically. If a package author tries to make a breaking API change without bumping the major version number, elm-package will detect this and refuse to publish it. No other known package manager enforces semantic versioning this reliably.
Fast and functional: Elm is a pure functional programming language, which guarantees no mutations or side effects. Not only do these guarantees make Elm code scale nicely, but they also help it render application UIs faster than React, Angular, or Ember.
Powerful tooling: elm-format formats source code according to a community standard. No more arguing over style conventions. Just hit Save in your editor of choice and your code becomes beautiful. elm-test ships with batteries-included support for both unit testing and fuzz testing. elm-css lets you write Elm code that compiles to a .css file, so you can share code between application and stylesheets to guarantee your constants never get out of sync.
Elm code can also interoperate with JavaScript, meaning you can introduce it in small doses to your JS code base so that you can still leverage the enormous JS ecosystem and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Crystal
Crystal is a general-purpose programming language with the motto "Fast as C, slick as Ruby." It's a high-level, statically typed, compiled, fully object-oriented programming language with advanced type inference and garbage collection.
The design goals of Crystal are:
Have a syntax similar to Ruby (but compatibility with it is not a goal).
Crystal has unique features such as:
Channels: Crystal uses Channels inspired by CSP (just like Go) to achieve concurrency. It has cooperative and lightweight threads called Fibers to achieve this. One can easily create a Fiber with the spawn keyword and make the operation asynchronous/nonblocking.
Macros: Crystal uses macros to avoid boilerplate code and gain metaprogramming abilities. Macros are really powerful and evaluated at compile time, meaning they have no performance penalty.
Crystal command: The crystal command itself is really powerful and comes with great built-in tools. It is used for creating a new project, compiling, running the test suite, and much more. There's also a built-in code formatter that you can use with crystal tool format. There's also crystal play, which is an interactive playground for some quick prototyping, just like irb.
Crystal is another language that hopes to bring C-like performance into the highly abstracted world of web developers. Crystal is aimed at the Ruby community, with a syntax that is similar to and, at times, identical to Ruby's. As the already large number of Ruby-based startups continues to grow, Crystal could play a key role in helping take those applications' performance to the next level.
Be statically type-checked but without having to specify the type of variables or method arguments.
Be able to call C code by writing bindings to it in Crystal.
Have compile-time evaluation and generation of code, to avoid boilerplate code.
Compile to efficient native code.
Elixir
First introduced in 2012, Elixir is a general-purpose functional language designed for productivity, scalability, and maintainability. While the language is relatively new, it compiles to bytecode that runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). The Erlang VM was born out of the telecom industry, has been evolving for almost 25 years, and powers many massive, high-availability, and low-latency systems.
Currently, Elixir is primarily used to build web applications using either Cowboy, which is a bare-bones HTTP server, or Phoenix, a full-featured web application framework. It is also building steam in the embedded hardware space with the Nerves framework.
The Elixir syntax and toolchain both draw some inspiration from Ruby. While the syntax similarities are only skin-deep, the toolchain will feel familiar to anyone who knows Ruby. The commands are well thought out, are easy to use, and facilitate great developer productivity.
Language goals
“Friendly” functional programming: The power and benefits of a functional language, with a clear and approachable syntax.
Distinguishing features
Immutable data structures and no side effects help to make large systems maintainable and easier to reason about.
Supervision allows you to define an internal process tree and set rules for automatic error recovery.
Pattern matching provides an alternative to conditionals and guard clauses.
Actor-based, share-nothing concurrency with processes is a good fit for solving today’s concurrency issues at scale. See The Road to 2 Million Connections.
Very efficient resource management means you can serve many users with limited hardware. See Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users.
Hot-swappable code for zero-downtime deploys.
Elixir and Phoenix are growing in popularity because the combination makes it easy to build sophisticated, robust web APIs and applications with great maintainability, excellent performance, and scalability. That’s why Pinterest, Bleacher Reports, and many other companies have invested in Elixir for key parts of their product infrastructure. You can have productivity without sacrificing performance (or vice versa), a claim not easily made by many other languages.
Elixir also takes a lot of inspiration from the Ruby ecosystem, but instead of trying to bring C-like benefits, it's focused on creating high-availability, low-latency systems—something Rails has had trouble with, according to critics. Elixir achieves these performance boosts by running on the Erlang VM, which has a strong performance reputation built over its 25 years in the telecom industry. The Phoenix application framework for Elixir—more than any piece of this blooming ecosystem—has given this language legs.
Ruby
In Ruby, everything is an object. Every bit of information and code can be given their own properties and actions. Object-oriented programming calls properties by the name instance variables and actions are known as methods. Ruby’s pure object-oriented approach is most commonly demonstrated by a bit of code which applies an action to a number.
Ruby is highly portable: it is developed mostly on GNU/Linux, but works on many types of UNIX, macOS, Windows, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, etc.
In many languages, numbers and other primitive types are not objects. Ruby follows the influence of the Smalltalk language by giving methods and instance variables to all of its types. This eases one’s use of Ruby, since rules applying to objects apply to all of Ruby.
Ruby has a wealth of other features, among which are the following:
Ruby has exception handling features, like Java or Python, to make it easy to handle errors.
Ruby features a true mark-and-sweep garbage collector for all Ruby objects. No need to maintain reference counts in extension libraries.
Writing C extensions in Ruby is easier than in Perl or Python, with a very elegant API for calling Ruby from C. This includes calls for embedding Ruby in software, for use as a scripting language. A SWIG interface is also available.
Ruby can load extension libraries dynamically if an OS allows.
Ruby features OS independent threading. Thus, for all platforms on which Ruby runs, you also have multi-threading, regardless of if the OS supports it or not, even on MS-DOS!.
Comments
Post a Comment