I make no secret of the fact that I have a very strong interest in programming languages. So I was naturally very interested when news of the Go Programming Language hit the intertubes. Go is an interesting language. It pulls together some very powerful features with a familiar, but clean syntax and has lightning fast compile times. It certainly takes a place on my to-learn list along with Haskell and Scala. But even as Go becomes the latest hot piece of language news, it dawned on me that over the past few years we’ve seen a slew of interesting languages offering compelling alternatives to the industry “mainstream”.
I guess it all started with the rise of scripting languages like Python, PHP, Ruby and the poster boy of scripting: Perl. Personally, these languages with their dynamic typing, “batteries included” design and interesting syntax provided a breath of fresh air from the likes of C++ and Java. Not that C++ and Java are necessarily bad languages, but they aren’t the most interesting of modern languages. In the early years of this decade computers were just getting fast enough to write large scale software in scripting languages. Things have changed a lot since then.
Dynamic languages aren’t just reserved for small scripts. Software like Ruby on Rails has proved that you can write really robust back end infrastructure with them. The languages for their part have kept on growing, adding features and making changes that keep them interesting and downright fun to use. Python 3.0 was a brave decision to make a break from backwards compatibility in order to do interesting things and it goes to show that these languages are far from ossifying or degrading.
Then there is JavaScript which was supposed to die a slow death by attrition as web programmers moved to Flash or Silverlight. But we all know that didn’t happen. JavaScript has stayed in the background since the rise of Netscape, but it’s only recently with advances in browser technology and growing standards support that it has really come into its own. I’ve only played with it a little, but it’s a fun little language which makes me feel a lot of the same emotions I felt when discovering Python for the first time. Thanks to efforts like Rhino, you can even use JavaScript on the client side for non-web related programming.
Of course, if you want to do really interesting things with these languages, then performance is not optional. Within the last year or two there’s been a strong push in both academia and industry to find ways to make these languages faster and safer. Google in particular seems to be in the thick of it. Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine is probably the fastest client side JavaScript environment and their still experimental Unladen Swallow project has already made headway in improving Python performance. V8 has already enabled some amazing projects and I’m waiting to see what Unladen Swallow will do.
While we’re on the topic of performance, mentioning the Java Virtual Machine is a must. The language itself seems to have fallen from grace lately, but the JVM is home to some of the most powerful compiler technology on the planet. It’s no wonder then that the JVM has become the target for a bunch of interesting languages. There are the ports of popular languages — JRuby, Jython and Rhino. But the more interesting ones are the JVM-centric ones. Scala is really interesting in that it was born of an academic research project but is becoming the strongest contender to Java’s position of premier JVM language. Clojure is another language that I don’t think many people saw coming. It brings the power of LISP to a modern JVM unleashing a wide range of possibilities. It has it’s detractors, but it’s certainly done a fair bit to make Lisp a well known name again.
Academia has always been a hot bed when it comes to language design. It’s produced wonders like Lisp and Prolog and is making waves again with creations like Haskell (whose goal is ostensibly to avoid popularity at all costs) and the ML group of languages. These powerful functional languages with wonderful type inference are a language aficionado’s dream come true in many ways and they still have years of innovation ahead of them.
Almost as a corollary to the theoretically grounded functional languages, systems languages have been getting some love too. D and now Go are both languages that acknowledge that C and C++ have both had their heyday and it’s time to realize that systems programming does not have to be synonymous with bit twiddling. D has gotten some flak recently for not evolving very cleanly over the last few years, but something is better than nothing. Also a real shift towards eliminating manual memory management is a welcome addition.
As someone who intends to seriously study language design and the related concepts in the years to come, it’s a really great time to be in getting involved in learning about languages. At the moment I’m trying to teach myself Common Lisp and I have a Scala book sitting on the shelf too. One fo these days, I plan on sitting down and making a little toy language to get used to the idea of creating a language. Till then, it’s going to be really interesting just watching how things work out in an increasingly multilingual world.
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