4 ms·

Ask HN: What were the most important new programming languages released in 2017?

25 points by aniijbod 9y ago

No need to give anything like a 'top 5' etc, but maybe say what was new and what was important about each.

juskrey 9y ago
How can one measure the importance of a newborn thing? We can say something is important only when it survives for a while
- asavinov 9y ago
  especially if it is about programming languages which evolve for many years
- Rexxar 9y ago
  Indeed, the answer to this question is "We will know in 20 years" IMHO.
- tomxor 9y ago
  Some languages are born more out of pragmatism, in which case time will surely tell; others are the embodiment of a new combination of principles and ideas. The later can be important in spite of their direct utility, I think it's reasonable to assign some value to both though. Those from the first class that appear to have potential; those from the second which are interesting and unique.
- aniijbod 9y ago
  Maybe I should have asked: - which new languages look like they might be the most important? - which languages look the most interesting/surprising/innovative? - which are your favorite new languages and why?
ska80 9y ago
A Language with Dependent Types: https://www.idris-lang.org https://www.idris-lang.org
- adrianN 9y ago
  Idris has a Wikipedia article since 2013.
  - ska80 9y ago
    Version 1.0 was released last April this year.
    - justdutch 9y ago
      But that doesn't mean its new. It just means its stable now.
franciscop 9y ago
Who are the most important people born in 2017? While you can point to some born from monarchy (big company), the truth is that we are years away from knowing the answer. Same with programming, just in a smaller timeframe.
blowski 9y ago
I don’t know how to answer that since I can’t even say what are the most ‘important’ programming languages of all time.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  All the current biggest 100 languages are important today. All the thousands of others are not so important (today). This question is: which if any of new languages will be (has properties indicating it could be) one of the big ones in the future?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
camus2 9y ago
Something completely new both released this year and that has reached wide adoption? I doubt any. Off topic but it's interesting dinosaurs like Ada or Fortran are actually making a subtle come back as an alternative to C/C++ or other non-gc languages such as Rust. Ultimately the need to write native tools that are as fast as possible because businesses work in a scale never seen before that make even regular JVM unfit for the job is an interesting turn of events in computing. This + scientific computing and the democratization of embedded computing.
- tomxor 9y ago
  > Something completely new both released this year and that has reached wide adoption? I doubt any There are many languages before 2017 that never reached wide adoption which could be considered important.
0x4f3759df 9y ago
WebAssembly
lolive 9y ago
My question would be: what were the most important programming languages, paradigms & frameworks YOU happily discovered in 2017?
- lolive 9y ago
  Functional Programming concepts applied to JavaScript (thanks to the @drboolean book and series of videos at egghead). + My first pro project with Java8. A poor man's programming language for FP gurus, but a real game changer for the average Java programmer (that I am).
alkonaut 9y ago
Languages age slowly. Before you heard of it, it’s probaly several years already. Before it reaches stability and nontrivial adoption it’s often a decade old. For “new in 2017” you should probably be looking at research papers for languages constructed to show off some novel feature. There are people who plow through almost everything written in type theory and language/compiler design. I don’t but I’d love to hear a summary of 2017 from the research side of things, from someone who does. If I were to mention one language that looks like it’s novel and recent, my pick would be Microsoft Q#
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Will it share the fate of the nice but mostly disused F#?
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    It will never see even a fraction of the use of F# which is general purpose and has a huge userbase (if we consider any language in the top 50 as being huge).
    - vram22 9y ago
      Do you know if F# has a good amount of jobs available and contracting opps available I have been checking it out some and like what I've learned about it so far.
tom_mellior 9y ago
I think Puffs looks like a cool new project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711767 Edit: Looks like it was renamed to Wuffs: https://github.com/google/wuffs https://github.com/google/wuffs It's a domain-specific language for parsers that should be fast and must be correct, and it includes relatively light-weight verification.
ilovetux 9y ago
While it wasn't released in 2017 , I think rust has a lot of promise. Mozilla used it to vastly improve firefox. Six months ago I would have said golang, but IMO Google is subject to constantly increasing scrutiny and their business practices are leading to developers becoming more wary of adopting their technology products. Rust, on the other hand, might be able to capitalize on Firefox quantum's generally positive reception. Fearless concurrency and ownership make rust a great toolset to take advantage of the increasingly parallel workloads of big-data. Also, it is a compiled language so it will avoid the bias against "scripting languages" which is present in certain circles. Personally, I have started toying around with rust and have found the results to be quite positive.
- jdc0589 9y ago
  how's the learning curve? I've heard it's a bit steep. One thing I appreciated about go was earlier this week I sat down, went through gobyexample.com, and was immediately able to produce a useful program without much stumbling about. In fact, the only stumbling i experienced was figuring out the gopath, vendoring, and dependency management situation.
- vorg 9y ago
  > golang, but IMO Google [...] business practices are leading to developers becoming more wary of adopting their technology products ...but many other developers learnt some Golang because it was backed by a large IT corp. Never underestimate the lure of CV padding, especially by the many aptitudally-challenged programmers out there.
AstralStorm 9y ago
Obviously C++17 and Java 9. Especially the latter with its major enhancement of standard library. Other languages are not notable or just tiny updates. Rust is a more interesting one but there was no major rework in 2017.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  > Especially the latter with its major enhancement of standard library. Can you say more about what was enhanced and how?
TylerJewell 9y ago
I joined a company, WSO2, as it's CEO earlier this year. Over the past couple years they have been working on a programming language for integrating and orchestrating across endpoints. They call it Ballerina. It is at Ballerinalang.org. it is early stages and the community is starting to grow. They are doing interesting things around using language syntax to abstract distributed network resilience issues that you typically require custom logic or frameworks for.
synthesissoft 9y ago
C# 24.0 Lots of cool new features were added!
augustoruby 9y ago
The most important is PHP, .NET AND JAVA

25 points by aniijbod 9y ago

No need to give anything like a 'top 5' etc, but maybe say what was new and what was important about each.

How can one measure the importance of a newborn thing? We can say something is important only when it survives for a while

asavinov 9y ago
especially if it is about programming languages which evolve for many years
Rexxar 9y ago
Indeed, the answer to this question is "We will know in 20 years" IMHO.
tomxor 9y ago
Some languages are born more out of pragmatism, in which case time will surely tell; others are the embodiment of a new combination of principles and ideas. The later can be important in spite of their direct utility, I think it's reasonable to assign some value to both though. Those from the first class that appear to have potential; those from the second which are interesting and unique.
aniijbod 9y ago
Maybe I should have asked: - which new languages look like they might be the most important? - which languages look the most interesting/surprising/innovative? - which are your favorite new languages and why?

ska80 9y ago

A Language with Dependent Types: https://www.idris-lang.org https://www.idris-lang.org

adrianN 9y ago
Idris has a Wikipedia article since 2013.
- ska80 9y ago
  Version 1.0 was released last April this year.
  - justdutch 9y ago
    But that doesn't mean its new. It just means its stable now.

franciscop 9y ago

Who are the most important people born in 2017? While you can point to some born from monarchy (big company), the truth is that we are years away from knowing the answer. Same with programming, just in a smaller timeframe.

blowski 9y ago

I don’t know how to answer that since I can’t even say what are the most ‘important’ programming languages of all time.

alkonaut 9y ago
All the current biggest 100 languages are important today. All the thousands of others are not so important (today). This question is: which if any of new languages will be (has properties indicating it could be) one of the big ones in the future?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

camus2 9y ago

Something completely new both released this year and that has reached wide adoption? I doubt any. Off topic but it's interesting dinosaurs like Ada or Fortran are actually making a subtle come back as an alternative to C/C++ or other non-gc languages such as Rust. Ultimately the need to write native tools that are as fast as possible because businesses work in a scale never seen before that make even regular JVM unfit for the job is an interesting turn of events in computing. This + scientific computing and the democratization of embedded computing.

tomxor 9y ago
> Something completely new both released this year and that has reached wide adoption? I doubt any There are many languages before 2017 that never reached wide adoption which could be considered important.

0x4f3759df 9y ago

WebAssembly

lolive 9y ago

My question would be: what were the most important programming languages, paradigms & frameworks YOU happily discovered in 2017?

lolive 9y ago
Functional Programming concepts applied to JavaScript (thanks to the @drboolean book and series of videos at egghead). + My first pro project with Java8. A poor man's programming language for FP gurus, but a real game changer for the average Java programmer (that I am).

alkonaut 9y ago

Languages age slowly. Before you heard of it, it’s probaly several years already. Before it reaches stability and nontrivial adoption it’s often a decade old. For “new in 2017” you should probably be looking at research papers for languages constructed to show off some novel feature. There are people who plow through almost everything written in type theory and language/compiler design. I don’t but I’d love to hear a summary of 2017 from the research side of things, from someone who does. If I were to mention one language that looks like it’s novel and recent, my pick would be Microsoft Q#

AstralStorm 9y ago
Will it share the fate of the nice but mostly disused F#?
- alkonaut 9y ago
  It will never see even a fraction of the use of F# which is general purpose and has a huge userbase (if we consider any language in the top 50 as being huge).
  - vram22 9y ago
    Do you know if F# has a good amount of jobs available and contracting opps available I have been checking it out some and like what I've learned about it so far.

tom_mellior 9y ago

I think Puffs looks like a cool new project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711767 Edit: Looks like it was renamed to Wuffs: https://github.com/google/wuffs https://github.com/google/wuffs It's a domain-specific language for parsers that should be fast and must be correct, and it includes relatively light-weight verification.

ilovetux 9y ago

While it wasn't released in 2017 , I think rust has a lot of promise. Mozilla used it to vastly improve firefox. Six months ago I would have said golang, but IMO Google is subject to constantly increasing scrutiny and their business practices are leading to developers becoming more wary of adopting their technology products. Rust, on the other hand, might be able to capitalize on Firefox quantum's generally positive reception. Fearless concurrency and ownership make rust a great toolset to take advantage of the increasingly parallel workloads of big-data. Also, it is a compiled language so it will avoid the bias against "scripting languages" which is present in certain circles. Personally, I have started toying around with rust and have found the results to be quite positive.

jdc0589 9y ago
how's the learning curve? I've heard it's a bit steep. One thing I appreciated about go was earlier this week I sat down, went through gobyexample.com, and was immediately able to produce a useful program without much stumbling about. In fact, the only stumbling i experienced was figuring out the gopath, vendoring, and dependency management situation.
vorg 9y ago
> golang, but IMO Google [...] business practices are leading to developers becoming more wary of adopting their technology products ...but many other developers learnt some Golang because it was backed by a large IT corp. Never underestimate the lure of CV padding, especially by the many aptitudally-challenged programmers out there.

AstralStorm 9y ago

Obviously C++17 and Java 9. Especially the latter with its major enhancement of standard library. Other languages are not notable or just tiny updates. Rust is a more interesting one but there was no major rework in 2017.

tom_mellior 9y ago
> Especially the latter with its major enhancement of standard library. Can you say more about what was enhanced and how?

TylerJewell 9y ago

I joined a company, WSO2, as it's CEO earlier this year. Over the past couple years they have been working on a programming language for integrating and orchestrating across endpoints. They call it Ballerina. It is at Ballerinalang.org. it is early stages and the community is starting to grow. They are doing interesting things around using language syntax to abstract distributed network resilience issues that you typically require custom logic or frameworks for.

synthesissoft 9y ago

C# 24.0 Lots of cool new features were added!

augustoruby 9y ago

The most important is PHP, .NET AND JAVA