Assume mainstream adoption as used by around 7% of all github projects
Personally, I’d like to see Nim get that growth.
Esperanto.
I too wish Esperanto would gain mass adoption but my only qualm with it is the consonant clusters that aren’t friendly for non-European language speakers.
Alas, there are enough serious problems to fill a book.
Given that Esperanto was created before most of modern linguistics, this isn’t all that surprising. Programmers don’t much write in Plankalkül either.
Toki Pona
A language that’s hard to say much in even if you know 100% of the vocabulary.
I think OP means programming language. Not the languages used by human to communicate each other.
What disrupted the fun for me:
- the rules for articles before languages, countries and their people
- everything sounds the same / easy to be misunderstood
- not nearly as internationally approachable as it could be, though obviously that’s almost impossible
If we’re saying 7% is the bar for mainstream, then Rust is my vote.
C# is not even mainstream by that standard.
I’d also like to see Julia used more.
I personally find multiple dispatch far more challenging to use than OOP. I’d reach for Torch over Flux any day.
Although, I really like that the majority of the Flux stack is Julia rather than a collection of Cpp.
What do you find challenging about multiple dispatch? I don’t use Julia for my job, so I can’t say I’ve had enough experience to have a strong opinion. MD seems like a valuable tool though.
Simply, the lsp is far less useful. An object might have a dozen methods that act like verbs or some attributes that act as adjectives.
In Julia there is a huge number of functions, that work differently for different types and different combinations of types. So finding the documentation involves finding the right name for a function that does different things for different types, then scrolling down the docs for the the behaviour that corresponds to the specific combination of inputs.
I moved from R/Py to Julia for a while before moving back to Py (and a little bit of Rust).
I love how fast Julia is and the 1-index is fine for me, but I still prefer py for the oop.
So there’s no LSP function to just show all of the multi-methods that accept a specific type? That’s a pretty serious tooling limitation.
Maybe Julia sounds better in theory than in practice, if the tooling still isn’t ready for production use.
Well it’s there, in one loooong print out. It’s not as bad as I’m making it out to be, however, I went back to python unfortunately.
The crucial issue with Julia, no error messages.
So I use Julia for things that need to be fast (e.g. moving hdf5 to SQL and ffts) but I use python for everything else (except ggplot).
Rust! Memory leak free code would make our world a better place!
Rust doesn’t guarantee the lack of memory leaks anymore then java/C++ does, so sadly not sure if it would help here. :)
Help me understand your point of view. How does Rust not prevent memory leaks?
There’s built in functions to leak memory that are perfectly safe. You can also do one really trivially by making a reference count cycle. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-06-reference-cycles.html
Rust only prevents memory unsafety - and memory leaks are perfectly safe. It’s use after frees, double frees, etc. It prevents.
And here you’re only talking about a subset of memory leaks, by inaccessible memory. You can also leak memory by pushing new elements in a channel while never reading them for example.
You are absolutely correct that rusts safety features don’t extend to memory leaks, but it’s still better than most garbage collected languages unless you abuse Rc or something, and it does give you quite fine-grained controll over lifetimes, copying and allocations on the heap which in practice means that rust is fairly good about memory leakages compared to most languages.
How would rust fare any better then a tracing GC? Realistically I’d expect them to use more memory, and also have worse determinism in memory management - but I fail to really see a case where rust would prevent memory leaks and GC languages wouldn’t.
If you just Rc everything (which I’d count as “abusing Rc”) Rust is significantly worse than a language with a good GC. The good thing about Rust is that it forces you to aknowledge and consider the lifetimes of objects. By default things are allocated on the stack, but if you make something global or dynamically handled (e.g. through Rc) you have to do so explicitly. In Rust the compiler has greater compile time information about when things can be freed which means that you need less runtime overhead to check things and if you want to minimize the amount of potentially long-lived objects you can more easily see how long objects might live by reading the code as well as get help by the compiler to determine if a lifetime-based refactoring is sound or not.
Reference counting is a GC though ?
It’s a bad one sure and will leak memory in cases of a cycle which most tracing GC are able to do.
It’s main advantage is that there are no GC pauses.
I think you know what I mean when I contrast Rust with GC’d languages, we can call it opt-in garbage collection if we’re being pedantic.
We can go further, I think it’s impossible to prevent memory leaks in a general purpose language
Not without a super fancy type system that has to be still found. I think the key issue is cyclic data-structures (e.g. doubly-linked list). The language somehow needs to have strong/weak pointers and automatically determining them is a very complex research question…
At this point, I think it’s almost mainstream, and it’s still growing fast (and it’s getting better, rust-analyzer is really awesome these days, I was there at the beginning, no comparison to today…))
I may be biased, but I think it’ll be the next big main language probably leaving other very popular ones behind it in the coming decade (Entry barrier and ease of use got much better over the last couple years, and the future sounds exciting with stuff like this)
Rust. I’ve been using it for a while, and I’ve been using more software written in it lately. Stuff you make with it is just better in most ways. In other languages, you have to go above and beyond to make your code fully correct, safe, user friendly, and every trait I value in software. Rust makes those things easy, and so people are more willing to do them, and so things that get made in it are better. Oftentimes it’s just a matter of pulling in a crate and adding a few lines of code.
Elixir… please I want an Elixir job
Elixir is such a beautifully designed language, my favorite language BY FAR.
(I want an Elixir job too 🥹 )
Haskell. I think that more people being familliar with Haskell concepts would be good for programing culture and it would increase the odds of me being able to write Haskell professionally, which is something I enjoy a lot when writing hobby code at least. Having more access to tooling and a bigger eco system would be nice as well.
I’m not a 100% sure about my answer though. For one, I might grow to resent Haskell if I had to use it at work, and there’s also a risk that it would be harder to do cool innovative stuff with the language when more big companies depend on it.
I’m obsessed with an extremely little known language called Grain. It’s not quite ready for production but it has an insanely intuitive functional syntax that I want to use noww.
Interesting!
I see OCaml with rust syntax, for the web, which checks out the project goal of bringing functional patterns to everyday programmers.
Some LISP going mainstream woulb be great!
(defun clever-comment (comment) (if (equal (count-parentheses comment) (* 2 (count-letters ’LISP))) ’Clever ’Not-Clever))
Vertigo inducing syntax .
Not many people know LISP actually stands for “Lots of Irritating and Stupid Parentheses”
It’s really not bad, just unfamiliar.
Crystal. The language is killer but there’s a real lack of libraries for it.
Until recently I never heard of crystal. There is a humble bundle for programming that includes a crystal book. That was the first time I heard of it.
I will have to take a look at the language. Who knows when having knowledge of crystal will be useful
What could be the “killer app” for Crystal is an equivalent of Rails, since its syntax attempts to be very similar to Ruby. Even supposing it maintains all of Rails’ inefficiencies, if it “just works” and has a very small learning curve for RoR veterans, adoption could grow steadily
I think Lucky framework as well as the other one (can’t think of the name now) are pretty solid. What gets me is the ORM learning curve simply because I don’t have tons of time to dedicate to learning it.
It’s also limiting not having lots of libraries (shards). Basically if you need to do anything outside the framework you’ll have to write it all yourself.
I would like to see Ada grow. Its clean syntax, rich expressive capabilities, and early error detection by the compiler due to strict typing create a very pleasant experience during development. This year, the language got a new standard. Recently, a package manager and a community index were created. There’s an extension/LSP for vscode, etc. Along with great educational materials on learn.adacore.com, it’s easy to pick up and start using this language.
PS I created a community on p.d two days ago: https://programming.dev/c/ada
Go. I love writing go, its so simple and predictable and the accessability of multithreading and being allowed to create as many “threads” as I want make me feel smart as fuck.
Clojure deserves more love.
I really enjoyed Clojure in uni but i have no reason to use it in my day to day work
Assembly, which flavor IDK but some RISC architecture.
If everyone spoke assembly the world would be a very different experience. I’m not saying that it would be better or worse, but it’d definitely be different.
I think the problem is that processors can have slightly different instruction sets, possibly less likely with ARM and RISC (Reduced Instruction, after all), and how they interpret bits and jumps (big endian, low endian). Chibi Akumas has a lot of material for learning assembly of various CPUs, including older ones like 68k and 6502, something I’m doing on and off once in a while
Solution: everyone speaks in some form of IR.
So, brainfuck assembly?
Swift.
It’s a wonderful language, it’s general purpose, it’s cross platform, and it’s open source (Apache license). I wish it was a mainstream language outside the of the Apple universe.
What I love the most is it’s so flexible. It’s a full featured OOP language, a full featured Procedural language, a full featured Functional language, a full featured declarative language, and you can relatively easily make it work with anything else you can think of.
It also has the best concurrency system I’ve ever seen - and with high performance computing relying so much on parallel computing these days that’s a must and often what I miss the most in other languages.
A lot of other languages do some things just as well as Swift, but Swift does everything really well.
Completely agree. Unfortunately Apple will need to start treating Swift on non-Apple platforms as a first class citizen for it to achieve any sort of wider popular use.
When Lattner left, it was a signal that they were unlikely to ever move in that direction. Since then, I’d say they’ve moved further away if anything. They certainly made a hell of mess introducing SwiftUI and Combine (though glad to say things have recovered significantly since then).
