Years ago, I wrote that Julia failed to reach any reasonable expectation. At the time, development was struggling, and the language had many problems trying to achieve any meaningful momentum.

Fortunately, time proved me wrong. And I am delighted I was. I am not sure what happened (as I said, I stopped following it), but the language had significant acceleration, and it finally got enough adoption and interest that it finally popped up a lot under my radar.

Let’s continue our exploration of novel kinda-low-level languages. After a quick exploration of Crystal, it is time to look at another language that is constantly popping up on my sources: Zig. It will be my new love? It will be the perfect tool I was looking for? It is the beginning of a new programming langue star? Let’s find out that together.

The Crystal programming language recently reached version 1.0. As a modern compiled language, it caught my attention. It is time to spend some time playing with it to have a better idea of its potentialities. Will this “Compiled Ruby” be the sweet spot between Python and Rust I am looking for?

My opinion is that talking about languages is usually a very unproductive use of time. If these discussions are just cat fights, then it is even worse. Unless you are a language designer, you are writing a language or study a language, you should just use a language and nobody should care.

But good articles on language pro and cons are always nice. They may be helpful to choose the right tool for the problem. For this reason I link a good article on Go. And that’s the last time I’ll talk about Go.

This is the time of the year in which I propose 5 emerging/new languages that you should keep an eye on the next year. I’ve done it last year, and the year before, and the year before that.

This year, however, I am not in the mood of doing it. There are several reasons why. The first one is that this year there have not been a lot of movement on the new programming languages. I am sure there are a lot, but no one got enough attention to make into a list. Therefore, I am concerned that I will just starting to repeat myself talking about the same stuff.

Another year, another 5 promising programming languages you should keep an eye on in 2017. As usual, I’d like to write the warning I put here every year: in this list, you will not find programming languages for hiring purposes, but for very long-time investments and for pure programming fetish.

So, now that you know what I am talking about, here we go with the top 5 for 2017.

Top 5 Promising Programming Languages for 2017

Rust

It is time to update one othe most popular article in this blog. It is time to talk about the most promising languages of 2016! But first, let me repeat the small notice I did the last year. The languages I am listing below are not the most used languages, or the languages that you have to learn in order to find a great job as a developer. There are many more established languages that fill this role. Languages such as C++, Java, C#, Python and JavaScript are way more solid and safe if you are looking for a job or to start a developer career.

Instead, I am trying to list emerging languages that may become more important at the end of 2016. This list is for you if: 1) you are passionate about programming languages 2) you want to learn something new because you are bored with your current language 3) you want to bet on a language hoping that it will become mainstream (and thus, you will be one of the early experts in that language, and this implies nice job opportunity). Or you can read this list because you are simply interested on where the language research and development is going in the real world (academic research is a totally different story).

UPDATE: There is a new version of this article for 2016!

In the the previous post we have seen what are the general trends of the previous year with regard to the fascinating world of programming languages. To summarize, we can say the there are two strong trends: 1) more functional-inspired elements in programming languages 2) more statically strong typed languages that can be compiled in machine code.

Now, in the current article, I want to list all the languages which have attracted interests in the last years and that represent the implementation of these trends. Obviously, as I said in the previous article, these are not languages on which to bet their careers: these are new trendy languages but the real world does not work on “trends”, but on software, oil, commerce, health care and an hundred of categories in which the actual programming languages are doing great with an huge amount of per-existing codebase.

However, it is nice to explore the “future”, so, let’s take a look.

UPDATE: There is a new version of this article for 2016!

At the very beginning of a new year, it is customary to try to predict what will happen in the future. That is the selling point of each big astrology book which pollute bookstores and newsstands in this part of the year.

Personally I’m not a fortune teller, but I think that can be interesting to try to set the route of the new year on the basis of the one just past. Obviously, I do not pretend to talk on every possible kind of events, but for the one I’m interested in, I think I can say something interesting or, at least, start a discussion.

So, let’s try to spend some words on the trends regarding programming languages and software development.