Assume mainstream adoption as used by around 7% of all github projects
Personally, I’d like to see Nim get that growth.
Esperanto.
I too wish Esperanto would gain mass adoption but my only qualm with it is the consonant clusters that aren’t friendly for non-European language speakers.
Alas, there are enough serious problems to fill a book.
Given that Esperanto was created before most of modern linguistics, this isn’t all that surprising. Programmers don’t much write in Plankalkül either.
Sorry to say, but once I realised how euro-centric, and to my ear/eye, latin-centric esparanto is I completely lost interest.
I don’t know if anyone has tried, but something which similarly draws influences from the languages that the vast majority of the world speak would be wonderful.
You made me think of that xkcd about standards.
Anyway, the eurocentrism argument, while perhaps true due to the Latin root, seems to be a little bit of a savior complex don’t you think? China itself pushed for Esperanto to be used as a business language internally late last century as I recall.
savior complex
I don’t see that at all.
It’s about making a language that the maximum amount of cultures can see themselves in, can have at least some familiarity with, and feel like they’ve been acknowledged in the making of a global language … all of which is intended to get maximum buy in around the world to establish a truely international language rather than a Lingua Franca derived from hegemony.
Maybe China was interested in Esperanto for a bit, but I’m betting like most stories like that it’s heavily exaggerated or outright bogus.
Someone already said that either the created language takes from too few source languages and alienates speakers of languages with no common characteristics or takes from every language family and becomes a horrible mess that’s hard to speak for everyone.
So if a world language is a bad idea no matter what languages you use as a source, why not have Esperanto or something similar for Europe/English speaking world and then a different language for Asia, and another one for Africa. You’ve reduced the number of translators needed and left most people with a language close to their mother tongue. You could also break the suggested regions in to smaller sections eg give Germanic Europe a common Germanic language. West/south Europe get Esperanto, east Europe sets a common slavic language. You still get languages that don’t neatly fit like Hungarian but its better for most language learners than the last example.
Personally I’d not propose universal languages as a utopian idea and instead promote indigenous languages such as Catalonian, Breton, Irish and promote learning many languages in a post work society.
Yeah we can invent yet another language, and go through the motions of including everyone. But by god make sure you don’t forget anyone. Let’s throw in Chamicuro, Warlpiri, Liki, Tanema, Ongota, and Dumi, just to make sure. Don’t want to upset anyone….
Or we could stop inventing new ways to accuse things of not being inclusive enough. It’s getting bonkers… Not saying Esperanto is the best language, and it has its flaws as others have so vehemently stated, but if inclusivity is the primary motive when designing a language, then I can almost certainly guarantee that new language will be much worse.
I mean English is basically the world language. It’s used by pilots, scientists, global finance, and diplomatic efforts. I’m gonna assume that almost no one would classify English as inclusive in its vocabulary. Unless you’re German, Dutch, or French of course. Esperanto is at least more accessible and easy to learn and carries Latin roots… shared with lots of languages. And it was invented by a member of a repressed minority in the old Russian Empire. What’s not to love?
My problem is not with inclusivity but with promoting uptake. If you are familiar with the grammar or phonetic sounds or some of the vocab, you are more likely to find that language easier to learn.
Both English and Esperanto share the same problems of universal languages that I mentioned. English does have the advantage of number of speakers but it is a mess of a language for people to have to learn.
Again to reiterate my counter to universal languages, why not learn and potentially help revive your local indigenous languages. In a world where universal translation exits on our phones everybody being able to speak the same language matters less.
Who cares if it’s European sounding, it’s still an interesting language that is relatively easy to learn, even for people from non-romance backgrounds.
Neo-Indo-European?
The issue is that modern languages are so diverse, you would wind up with a horrid, unusable patchwork.
What disrupted the fun for me:
- the rules for articles before languages, countries and their people
- everything sounds the same / easy to be misunderstood
- not nearly as internationally approachable as it could be, though obviously that’s almost impossible
I think OP means programming language. Not the languages used by human to communicate each other.
Jes
If we’re saying 7% is the bar for mainstream, then Rust is my vote.
C# is not even mainstream by that standard.
I’d also like to see Julia used more.
I personally find multiple dispatch far more challenging to use than OOP. I’d reach for Torch over Flux any day.
Although, I really like that the majority of the Flux stack is Julia rather than a collection of Cpp.
What do you find challenging about multiple dispatch? I don’t use Julia for my job, so I can’t say I’ve had enough experience to have a strong opinion. MD seems like a valuable tool though.
Simply, the lsp is far less useful. An object might have a dozen methods that act like verbs or some attributes that act as adjectives.
In Julia there is a huge number of functions, that work differently for different types and different combinations of types. So finding the documentation involves finding the right name for a function that does different things for different types, then scrolling down the docs for the the behaviour that corresponds to the specific combination of inputs.
I moved from R/Py to Julia for a while before moving back to Py (and a little bit of Rust).
I love how fast Julia is and the 1-index is fine for me, but I still prefer py for the oop.
So there’s no LSP function to just show all of the multi-methods that accept a specific type? That’s a pretty serious tooling limitation.
Maybe Julia sounds better in theory than in practice, if the tooling still isn’t ready for production use.
Well it’s there, in one loooong print out. It’s not as bad as I’m making it out to be, however, I went back to python unfortunately.
The crucial issue with Julia, no error messages.
So I use Julia for things that need to be fast (e.g. moving hdf5 to SQL and ffts) but I use python for everything else (except ggplot).
Haskell. I think that more people being familliar with Haskell concepts would be good for programing culture and it would increase the odds of me being able to write Haskell professionally, which is something I enjoy a lot when writing hobby code at least. Having more access to tooling and a bigger eco system would be nice as well.
I’m not a 100% sure about my answer though. For one, I might grow to resent Haskell if I had to use it at work, and there’s also a risk that it would be harder to do cool innovative stuff with the language when more big companies depend on it.
Zig hasn’t been mentioned yet, so I’m just going to drop that here.
I personally have enjoyed the meta-programming, the ease of integrating with C libraries, and like that it’s pretty straight-forward to compile.
Elixir… please I want an Elixir job
The most beautiful language. Why doesn’t every language have pipes?
I find Universal Function Call Syntax a much nicer solution than pipes, although I don’t think it’s quite as broad.
For example, taking the example from elixir’s home page:
"Elixir" |> String.graphemes() |> Enum.frequencies()would be
"Elixir".graphemes.frequencesin something like D
Why doesn’t every language have pipes?
Mario’s favorite character
Elixir is such a beautifully designed language, my favorite language BY FAR.
(I want an Elixir job too 🥹 )
Rust. I’ve been using it for a while, and I’ve been using more software written in it lately. Stuff you make with it is just better in most ways. In other languages, you have to go above and beyond to make your code fully correct, safe, user friendly, and every trait I value in software. Rust makes those things easy, and so people are more willing to do them, and so things that get made in it are better. Oftentimes it’s just a matter of pulling in a crate and adding a few lines of code.
I just wish Rust’s syntax (and devs attitude) wasn’t so unpalatably shite
I seriously can’t stand that shit but I really like it’s ideas
I think what you’re calling ugly is just static typing. There’s no way to make it look beautiful unless you leave the types away, but then you either end up with some kind of dynamically typed looking language by declaring things twice: once with types and then without.
At first glance, sure it would be easier to read, but if you have to look for the types then things get much harder. Either the types will be in comments, on different lines, or in a different file entirely.
It’s doubtful you’ll find a statically typed language that does a better job. C/C++ look even worse than rust. Go and Zig don’t look good either, IMO.
At first glance, sure it would be easier to read, but if you have to look for the types then things get much harder. Either the types will be in comments, on different lines, or in a different file entirely.
This is pretty much how OCaml works and you can omit the types altogether if you don’t specify an interface file, in most cases. But it’s not hard to deal with in practice since IDEs (and text editor + LSP plugin) can easily show the inferred type on inspection.
Nevertheless, I don’t really find Rust to be ugly either.
I’m a long time C user Almost everything I write is in some strongly typed language lol
I still find C much easier to read and understand than any large Rust codebase
I’m obsessed with an extremely little known language called Grain. It’s not quite ready for production but it has an insanely intuitive functional syntax that I want to use noww.
Interesting!
I see OCaml with rust syntax, for the web, which checks out the project goal of bringing functional patterns to everyday programmers.Could you give some examples of what you like so much?
Pony! Its actor based, with a really interesting type system
It’s a pity there is not 1 code example on the Front Page. I spent a few minutes trying to find a page with some code and all I found was Why, Why Not, what is different etc and not any code examples so I am out. Look at Zig within seconds I can see if I like the syntax, does it make sense to me. I would love to know what Pony lang looks like. I might like it but it seems like
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Crystal. The language is killer but there’s a real lack of libraries for it.
Until recently I never heard of crystal. There is a humble bundle for programming that includes a crystal book. That was the first time I heard of it.
I will have to take a look at the language. Who knows when having knowledge of crystal will be useful
Obligatory shoutout
Nice! 😎
What could be the “killer app” for Crystal is an equivalent of Rails, since its syntax attempts to be very similar to Ruby. Even supposing it maintains all of Rails’ inefficiencies, if it “just works” and has a very small learning curve for RoR veterans, adoption could grow steadily
I think Lucky framework as well as the other one (can’t think of the name now) are pretty solid. What gets me is the ORM learning curve simply because I don’t have tons of time to dedicate to learning it.
It’s also limiting not having lots of libraries (shards). Basically if you need to do anything outside the framework you’ll have to write it all yourself.
Assembly, which flavor IDK but some RISC architecture.
If everyone spoke assembly the world would be a very different experience. I’m not saying that it would be better or worse, but it’d definitely be different.
I think the problem is that processors can have slightly different instruction sets, possibly less likely with ARM and RISC (Reduced Instruction, after all), and how they interpret bits and jumps (big endian, low endian). Chibi Akumas has a lot of material for learning assembly of various CPUs, including older ones like 68k and 6502, something I’m doing on and off once in a while
Solution: everyone speaks in some form of IR.
So, brainfuck assembly?
Clojure deserves more love.
I really enjoyed Clojure in uni but i have no reason to use it in my day to day work
I would like to see Ada grow. Its clean syntax, rich expressive capabilities, and early error detection by the compiler due to strict typing create a very pleasant experience during development. This year, the language got a new standard. Recently, a package manager and a community index were created. There’s an extension/LSP for vscode, etc. Along with great educational materials on learn.adacore.com, it’s easy to pick up and start using this language.
PS I created a community on p.d two days ago: https://programming.dev/c/ada
Swift.
It’s a wonderful language, it’s general purpose, it’s cross platform, and it’s open source (Apache license). I wish it was a mainstream language outside the of the Apple universe.
What I love the most is it’s so flexible. It’s a full featured OOP language, a full featured Procedural language, a full featured Functional language, a full featured declarative language, and you can relatively easily make it work with anything else you can think of.
It also has the best concurrency system I’ve ever seen - and with high performance computing relying so much on parallel computing these days that’s a must and often what I miss the most in other languages.
A lot of other languages do some things just as well as Swift, but Swift does everything really well.
Completely agree. Unfortunately Apple will need to start treating Swift on non-Apple platforms as a first class citizen for it to achieve any sort of wider popular use.
When Lattner left, it was a signal that they were unlikely to ever move in that direction. Since then, I’d say they’ve moved further away if anything. They certainly made a hell of mess introducing SwiftUI and Combine (though glad to say things have recovered significantly since then).
Go. I love writing go, its so simple and predictable and the accessability of multithreading and being allowed to create as many “threads” as I want make me feel smart as fuck.
I would LOVE for Nim to get more web stuff
