Modern Programming Languages

Programming languages ...

• are the most important tool of software developers
• determine the way of thinking (if the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is correct)

There are ...

• general purpose programming languages
• domain specific programming languages
• modeling languages

What language(s) should be used?

• That depends on the project and the knowledge of the team members

D 2.0

D 2.0 is like C/C++ a system-level language, but with garbage collection and integrates imperative object oriented programming with functional and concurrent programming (actor model).

Erlang

Erlang is a concurrent programming language with a functional language as it's core, strict evaluation and dynamic typing. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, concurrent systems and has been used esp. in the telecommunications area.

Groovy

Groovy is an agile dynamically typed language extension of Java.

Fortress

Fortress is brand new specification of a next generation programming language specifically designed for high performance computing (HPC). It is very innovative, but not yet ready for practice.

Haskell

Haskell is a purely functional programming language. I wrote my diploma thesis about the implementation of geometrical algorithms in this language.

Python

Python is a multi-paradigm programming language that ´ incorporates imperative, functional and object-oriented features. Python has a dynamic type system.

Ruby

Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented language and often used in web development.

Scala

Scala is a statically typed multi-paradigm programming language, that integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. It is integrated into Java and .NET.

The following languages are all in development. It is not foreseeable if they are gonna be successful.

Chapel

Chapel is a imperative and concurrent language and has an interesting concept of "domain maps" to partition data onto processors.

Fortress

Fortress is an specification of a very advanced programming language that resembles mathematical notation. It is so advanced that there is no implementation available yet.

X10

X10 is developed by IBM and supports the hardware of IBM, esp. the "partitioned global address spaces" (PGAS).

Java

In the early nineties i dreamed of a interpreted language similar to C++, because the development cycle at that time was painfully slow (and often still is with C++): code, compile, run, crash (because of a pointer or memory allocation error) and reboot and again. And then Java arrived. Java is very old, but it evolved and I still like to program in Java. There never has been such a huge code library for a single programming language before.

C++

A new version of C++ called C++0x will be released soon. See above for the painful development cycle with C++.

Gödel

Gödel named after the logician Kurt Gödel is a declarative logic programming language. Gödel programs look much better than corresponding prolog programs.

λProlog

λProlog is higher order logic programming language. It provides lambda terms (aka closures) and a lot of other advanced features.

Perl

Perl is a language that incorporates features of a lot of languages and tools from the 80ies and 90ies (sed, awk, C, shell scripting and Lisp). It was my all purpose scripting and prototyping language for years. The language caught my interest again recently with the book Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus. But newer languages provide the features described in the book in a better way. The newest version Perl6 is under development.

Various old programming languages i used

Basic, C, Eiffel, Forth, GFA Basic, Lisp, Logo, Pascal, Prolog, Scheme, Smalltalk, Turbo Pascal