36 ms·

Will you please share the languages you thunk are up and coming?

jerf 9y ago
Go is an early entrant into this space, but I think part of the reason it is early is also that it is less ambitious. But to answer the ever-present question on HN about "why would anyone ever use this language?", something modern, almost as easy to use as a scripting language [1], and almost as fast as a compiled language, doesn't actually have a lot of contenders. (Old fogeys... like me!... like to observe that if you drop modern you have some things like Delphi that fit that slot, but they're all pretty much dead now, and Go has good support for concurrency in the modern processor environment.) In the "you probably can't convince your boss yet" category I'd recommend Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/) and Nim (https://nim-lang.org/ https://nim-lang.org/). Given the programming landscape and the general direction of things lately, I also bet there's a couple of serious contenders developing out there that haven't even hit HN yet. [1]: For at least a broad class of problems. Put Go head-to-head with a problem someone would use NumPy for and Go will go down in flames in the ease-of-use and line count department. However I use Go for a lot of networks servers (not even necessarily Web servers, but network servers) and the line count for these comes out maybe 20% larger than Python, and it doesn't take much developer cognitive energy for those extra lines. I've also used Go for some command-line type apps where the line count is probably 50% over Python, but I also got some significant wins from the type system and concurrency, so, all in all there's a lot of things I can prototype with about the same mental effort in Go as I could in Python. Being able to declare interfaces that existing types conform to turns out to cover a surprising amount of those "duck-type" scripting-type cases.

jerf 9y ago

Go is an early entrant into this space, but I think part of the reason it is early is also that it is less ambitious. But to answer the ever-present question on HN about "why would anyone ever use this language?", something modern, almost as easy to use as a scripting language [1], and almost as fast as a compiled language, doesn't actually have a lot of contenders. (Old fogeys... like me!... like to observe that if you drop modern you have some things like Delphi that fit that slot, but they're all pretty much dead now, and Go has good support for concurrency in the modern processor environment.) In the "you probably can't convince your boss yet" category I'd recommend Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/) and Nim (https://nim-lang.org/ https://nim-lang.org/). Given the programming landscape and the general direction of things lately, I also bet there's a couple of serious contenders developing out there that haven't even hit HN yet. [1]: For at least a broad class of problems. Put Go head-to-head with a problem someone would use NumPy for and Go will go down in flames in the ease-of-use and line count department. However I use Go for a lot of networks servers (not even necessarily Web servers, but network servers) and the line count for these comes out maybe 20% larger than Python, and it doesn't take much developer cognitive energy for those extra lines. I've also used Go for some command-line type apps where the line count is probably 50% over Python, but I also got some significant wins from the type system and concurrency, so, all in all there's a lot of things I can prototype with about the same mental effort in Go as I could in Python. Being able to declare interfaces that existing types conform to turns out to cover a surprising amount of those "duck-type" scripting-type cases.