The software industry is rapidly expanding with the release of more powerful processors and circuit boards to fuel the demand for better performance. As long as the machine has an operating system, it will receive inputs commands and execute them logically. As such, developers are always on the lookout for new programming languages they can add to their computational toolkit.
Learning how to write computer programs is an important skill, whether it be mobile apps, medical devices, or robot arms–you name it. But the real question still stands: Which new programming language should you learn in 2020? Are you overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information on GitHub?
Making Breakthroughs in the Software Industry with Modern Programming Languages
Each language has its own use case in which some are suited for game design and others belong on webpages. While you can’t go wrong by picking one that is popular among tech companies, it wouldn’t hurt to learn one that just arrived on the Github scene.
Either way, it will increase your productivity, make you a better coder, and help take your career to the next level. Here are eight recommended programming languages to learn in 2020:
1. Go
Go is a practical language developed by Google to manage difficulties large organizations face in scaling code. Go’s built-in features resolve coding issues, generating a single binary code that runs directly without incurring additional runtime.
Go offers CSP-based message passing instead of shared-memory concurrency. It also replaces class inheritance through embedding for composition and interfaces that provide polymorphism. Go has an embedded garbage collector for managing code memory.
2. Rust
Rust is a programming language released by Mozilla. It features memory and concurrency safety for compiled code and performs faster than C++ with no runtime on hardware. In addition, it offers LLVM support and can be operated with WebAssembly at the same time.
Rust has the capacity for functional and data concurrency with its immutable data structures and extensive programming features. Its syntax is easy to learn and is optimized for resource management with next to no overhead.
3. Julia
Julia is an advanced programming language designed for numerical analysis. It consists of a mathematical function library and a distributed program for parallel computing. Julia’s open-source C and Fortran libraries serve as tools for linear algebra, processing strings, and generating random numbers.
It also gives users the option to define functions across many combinations of arguments. This language has the flexibility to support many types of parallelism and is perfect for building web apps.
4. Kotlin
Kotlin is considered to be an upgraded version of Java. Developed by Jet Brains, it runs on the Java Virtual Machine and reduces the need for boilerplate code. Kotlin became widely accepted after Google called it a “first-class” language for Android development.
It makes use of simple and clean code to raise coding efficiency. Currently, Kotlin features both Type Inference and Null pointer safety. It is possible to access Java libraries from the interface to back your coding projects.
5. Elixir
Elixir is a dynamic programming language that developers use to create distributed apps in real-time. It is executed on BEAM, an Erlang VM that assembles Elixir into bytecode. It serves to boost the performance of Ruby apps that run on multiple CPUs.
The code is displayed as expressions, allowing the user to call functions without affecting the run time. Elixir prioritizes recursion and high-order functions over side effects in loops. Likewise, it conducts pattern matching and presents a lightweight concurrency.
6. Swift
Since Java is unable to run on iOS, the guys at Apple invented Swift, an alternative language that is interoperable with the Objective-C codebase. Swift is used for developing iOS apps on mobile devices. It presents a readable syntax and components of modern languages such as null safety and syntactic sugar.
Its speed easily rivals that of C++. Swift is suitable for server-side or browser programming with its LLVM compiler toolchain support and compatibility with Automatic Reference Counting.
7. Typescript
Developers were getting frustrated by Javascript’s lack of modularization and their frequent encounters with the “pyramid of doom”. In turn, Microsoft developed Typescript which acted as a modular superset of Javascript and achieves the productivity of Python and Go.
It can be scaled to larger coding projects and is supported by single page application frameworks like Angular. Typescript is currently backed by an open-source community of developers from Microsoft and Google which does explain its powerful scripting tools.
8. Dart
Dart is another language created by Google for general purposes including Object-Oriented Programming and Strong Typing. It offers JIT and AOT compilation to control Javascript runtime. Dart was selected by the app development platform, Flutter as the main language for building mobile apps.
Dart provides tooling support and all the features available on Flutter’s user interface. It can run on the same website or server as Javascript and is focused on productivity, through its clean, shortened syntax.
The Take-Apart from All This
Programming languages have endless applications in our world, from cloud computing to large-scale databases. Many of them are already becoming mainstream thanks to contributions made by developers from tech giants like Google.
In the meantime, developers can test out the features implemented into modern programming languages, with their terse syntax, type inference, lower cognitive load, and null pointer safety. If you want to sharpen your coding skills, one good way to do that is to start over with a new language.
These eight emerging programming languages will be the game-changers of tomorrow’s operating systems, spanning a wide range of use cases from data science to visualization. It would be no surprise if they inspire the growth of numerous software startups in the next decade or so.
