Ask HN: What were the most important new programming languages released in 2017?
No need to give anything like a 'top 5' etc, but maybe say what was new and what was important about each.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
- 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?
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#
Other languages are not notable or just tiny updates. Rust is a more interesting one but there was no major rework in 2017.
Can you say more about what was enhanced and how?
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.
There are many languages before 2017 that never reached wide adoption which could be considered important.
Edit: Looks like it was renamed to 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.