21st Century (so far) Programming Languages
Seems like there's a veritable explosion of new programming
languages being designed. There are a few pages that attempt
to be exhaustive; to collect big lists of all known programming
languages:
But what I'm looking for here is *recent* ones (C# and D don't count
as recent despite being chronologically recent; all of the
*ideas* in each are over 10 years old) that have been designed
from the start to live in the 21st century -- to take into account some
of the factors that have changed significantly over the past few years.
I'm talking about factors like the recent steep drop in memory prices;
the relative omnipresence of the net and the Web; the ubiquity of
XML and HTML for structured data transfer and presentation;
and the high percentage of programmers who interact with their
programs via multi-windowing interfaces.
I don't really know of many languages or program development
systems that have made radical departures from the linear,
text syntax based form that remains overwhelmingly the most popular
way for programmers to view their programs. I can think of only a
couple, Smalltalk (a pioneer in the way its IDE was browser-based)
and Prograph (a "truly visual" programming language).
But both of these are over 15 or 20 years old.
Despite sticking with the linear syntax, the
following languages sound promising (seen on either
the Lambda Weblog or the MIT "Little Languages List")...
- Scala (successor to funnel)
- Goo (successor to Proto; influenced by Dylan, scheme,
Cecil, CLOS [and apparently APL :-/ ])
- Arc (a "new Lisp"; Paul Graham's project)
A few slightly less new languages or ones saddled with some
backwards compatibility issues ...
Cool ones that didn't really catch on or I never
really learned despite wanting to spend a bit more
time with them:
- Beta
- Cecil
- Clean
- Dylan
- Sather (and Eiffel)
- Oz
11:57:04 PM
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