4 ms·

Actually it's being hyped that's weird. There are literally dozens of very interesting languages being created and developed right now and I bet you don't know

Actually it's being hyped that's weird. There are literally dozens of very interesting languages being created and developed right now and I bet you don't know of any of them. The only - and they are very few in comparison - languages which are being hyped since very early in their life cycle are the ones backed by corporations. Both Rust and Go are such languages and that's basically it. "Normal" languages live on a different time scale: it takes many years to gather enough users to even have a chance of generating a bit of hype. For most languages that moment never comes: they are good, solid languages with decades of development behind them and completely obscure and unknown. Others become well-known in certain areas while still being unfamiliar for the "general public". Take a look at Haxe, Opa, Elixir, Cobra or Io for example. They are all very interesting (each for its own reasons), mature and productive - and completely unknown. Out of those only Elixir gets mentioned here sometimes. Anyway, a choice of language should never be based on "hype" alone. Of course, language popularity is an important factor, but most often limiting yourself to popular languages is a case of premature optimization: it's quite likely that in your project the language popularity won't make a difference (especially in small/short-lived projects) and that "raw" language features are more important than hype. (Of course that's not always the case: bigger or long-lived projects benefit from language popularity very much, for example by having easier time finding replacements for developers who went away and so on)

noselasd 12y ago
I'll add http://pike.lysator.liu.se/ http://pike.lysator.liu.se/ to that list of "unknown" languages - It's my go-to language for doing simple prototyping.
- klibertp 12y ago
  Right, those were just examples, there are many (many!) more interesting languages. Pike is a bit of a special case due to its history though. I first learned it in the 90ties, when I joined an effort to port some MUD from LPC - Pike's predecessor - to Pike. At the time both LPC and Pike looked very weird to me, coming from mostly static, compiled languages like C and Pascal. A "mixed" datatype (like void* in C) with type predicates was something new to me, built-in mappings and other high-level datatypes were too. I don't remember the details, but I think both Pike and LPC had an unusual object system, closer to prototype-oriented languages like Self, JS, Io or Lua than to "normal" class-based ones (but I may be wrong on this). Anyway, it's another good example of solid and mature but unpopular (to the point of obscurity) languages.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I personally wouldn't label Haxe as "completely unknown" - as a general-purpose language, yes, but it's relatively popular in game development due to its "killer app" of OpenFL.
wbhart 12y ago
One of the things that kills some of these "completely unknown" languages is that it isn't obvious they are still being developed. The last known release is years ago, or they still only support one platform, etc.
deleted 12y ago
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eternalban 12y ago
| Actually it's being hyped that's weird. | The economic realities of software development require disposable human resources.
- eikenberry 12y ago
  And this is why most most large software projects fail. Software development is not something 'disposable human resources' can do reliably.
  - eternalban 12y ago
    I agree. Software development is (as of now) in its arts and crafts stage of development. Expertise matters. Experience matters. Professionalism matters. The "economic realities" are /symptomatic/ of the impedance mismatch of an 'industrial scale' demand on the consumer side and an arts and crafts production side. > most .. projects fail. It is a minor miracle that they can even be attempted and many even succeed.
boris1 12y ago
Another unknown language, in which I program, is Pliant www.fullpliant.org
codexon 12y ago
Last time I checked Io was slow and it didn't solve any new problems. If I wanted a slow OO language, I would rather keep using ruby/python as I already know them. Haxe has the small niche of flash type games, and I think it is doing fine in that area. But to expect it to be as popular as a general purpose language is not warranted.
- klibertp 12y ago
  Haxe is general purpose language. It compiles - among other things - to Neko VM, which is a really nice little VM, good for rapid prototyping and to C++ code which is good for everything. The latter is how Haxe supports iOS IIRC. Io is not "slow", although the level of dynamism it provides has obvious performance downsides. It's generally "fast enough" and - in my experience - a bit faster than CPython. Slower than JITed Lua though. It does, however, solve the C10k problem with its coroutines, actors and futures, which are implemented transparently for the user and with niceties like automatic deadlock detection (on runtime). It's not exactly anything new, but it was new when Io first appeared (I mean the implementation as a language feature, not the concept which is probably 3x as old as even I am). It has also very nice C FFI and very flexible, easily modifiable syntax and optional lazy evaluation which makes it great for developing DSLs. That being said I don't "expect" these languages to be popular. For the most part, for most developers out there, it genuinely makes no sense to know them. I'd like them to be more popular, but I'm not stressing over this. I know them and I think I can use them to my advantage where it makes sense and that's enough for me personally.
  - codexon 12y ago
    But the thing is that Haxe doesn't really solve anything else other than being good for flash games. So even if it is Turing Complete, there is no point in spending time learning it if you do not care about making flash games. And last time I checked, Io was slower than CPython and offered nothing more than a little more ideological OO purity. It didn't have any killer feature.

noselasd 12y ago

I'll add http://pike.lysator.liu.se/ http://pike.lysator.liu.se/ to that list of "unknown" languages - It's my go-to language for doing simple prototyping.

klibertp 12y ago
Right, those were just examples, there are many (many!) more interesting languages. Pike is a bit of a special case due to its history though. I first learned it in the 90ties, when I joined an effort to port some MUD from LPC - Pike's predecessor - to Pike. At the time both LPC and Pike looked very weird to me, coming from mostly static, compiled languages like C and Pascal. A "mixed" datatype (like void* in C) with type predicates was something new to me, built-in mappings and other high-level datatypes were too. I don't remember the details, but I think both Pike and LPC had an unusual object system, closer to prototype-oriented languages like Self, JS, Io or Lua than to "normal" class-based ones (but I may be wrong on this). Anyway, it's another good example of solid and mature but unpopular (to the point of obscurity) languages.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

I personally wouldn't label Haxe as "completely unknown" - as a general-purpose language, yes, but it's relatively popular in game development due to its "killer app" of OpenFL.

wbhart 12y ago

One of the things that kills some of these "completely unknown" languages is that it isn't obvious they are still being developed. The last known release is years ago, or they still only support one platform, etc.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

eternalban 12y ago

| Actually it's being hyped that's weird. | The economic realities of software development require disposable human resources.

eikenberry 12y ago
And this is why most most large software projects fail. Software development is not something 'disposable human resources' can do reliably.
- eternalban 12y ago
  I agree. Software development is (as of now) in its arts and crafts stage of development. Expertise matters. Experience matters. Professionalism matters. The "economic realities" are /symptomatic/ of the impedance mismatch of an 'industrial scale' demand on the consumer side and an arts and crafts production side. > most .. projects fail. It is a minor miracle that they can even be attempted and many even succeed.

boris1 12y ago

Another unknown language, in which I program, is Pliant www.fullpliant.org

codexon 12y ago

Last time I checked Io was slow and it didn't solve any new problems. If I wanted a slow OO language, I would rather keep using ruby/python as I already know them. Haxe has the small niche of flash type games, and I think it is doing fine in that area. But to expect it to be as popular as a general purpose language is not warranted.

klibertp 12y ago
Haxe is general purpose language. It compiles - among other things - to Neko VM, which is a really nice little VM, good for rapid prototyping and to C++ code which is good for everything. The latter is how Haxe supports iOS IIRC. Io is not "slow", although the level of dynamism it provides has obvious performance downsides. It's generally "fast enough" and - in my experience - a bit faster than CPython. Slower than JITed Lua though. It does, however, solve the C10k problem with its coroutines, actors and futures, which are implemented transparently for the user and with niceties like automatic deadlock detection (on runtime). It's not exactly anything new, but it was new when Io first appeared (I mean the implementation as a language feature, not the concept which is probably 3x as old as even I am). It has also very nice C FFI and very flexible, easily modifiable syntax and optional lazy evaluation which makes it great for developing DSLs. That being said I don't "expect" these languages to be popular. For the most part, for most developers out there, it genuinely makes no sense to know them. I'd like them to be more popular, but I'm not stressing over this. I know them and I think I can use them to my advantage where it makes sense and that's enough for me personally.
- codexon 12y ago
  But the thing is that Haxe doesn't really solve anything else other than being good for flash games. So even if it is Turing Complete, there is no point in spending time learning it if you do not care about making flash games. And last time I checked, Io was slower than CPython and offered nothing more than a little more ideological OO purity. It didn't have any killer feature.