How and why languages ​​are formed / Are there any developing languages ​​that demonstrate promise?

Question 1 : How exactly did the modern computer language appear and why? How do they begin to exist and who is behind them?

Question 2 : if any, which languages ​​are currently demonstrating their future?

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How exactly does modern computer language come about and why? How do they get their start and who is behind them?

This is a multi-step process:

  • Theorists like Pointy-head and other professionals are constantly offering new language features. You can read about them in places like the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Programming Languages ​​(POPL), which has been held annually since 1973.

  • Many of these proposals are actually implemented in some research language ; Some research languages ​​that I personally see as promising include Coq and Agda. Haskell is a former research language that made it great. The research language, which receives 10 users, is often considered its designers. Many research languages ​​never go that far.

    From research to deployment, I know two models:

  • Model A: A talented amateur comes and synthesizes a whole bunch of existing functions, possibly including some new ideas, into a new language. The lover has talent, charisma and, possibly, a killer app. Thus, C, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl are born.

  • Model P: A talented professional makes career sacrifices to build and unveil a new language. A professional possesses talent, a deep knowledge of the field and, possibly, a killer application. Thus, Haskell, Lua, ML, Pascal, Scala and the scheme are born.

My definition of a professional is someone who gains knowledge about programming languages, transfers this knowledge and develops new knowledge in programming languages. Unfortunately, this is not the same as developing and introducing new languages, and it is not the same as making implementations that many people can use. This is why most successful programming languages ​​are designed and created by amateurs, not professionals.

There were many interesting research languages ​​that hundreds or even thousands of users had, but still never made it big. Of these, my favorites are probably Icon . I argued elsewhere that no one knows why languages ​​are becoming popular.

Summary: Languages ​​come about because people want to make programming better, and they have new ideas. Languages ​​begin when someone takes a whole bunch of ideas, some new and some proven, and synthesizes them into a single whole. This is a lot of work. The person behind the new language may be a professional in a programming language, but historically most of the languages ​​that are widely used seem to be created by talented lovers.

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Answer 2: Fortran 2008 looks very promising.

Come on, lift your humorous Java teens, Pythonettes, Rubes and Haskellites down!

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1) Most of the development environments these days are built in such a way as to abstract a lot of low-level / internal actions of the platform in order to accelerate the development and maintain new user interfaces and technologies of the platform. There are both open source projects and corporations behind these changes ... For example, the example would be jQuery - this is a new library that just wraps a lot of javascript, simplifying and cross-platform ...

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Bjarne Straustrup wrote a book about the history of C ++, entitled "Design and Evolution of C ++" .

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  • The genesis of a programming language is always a different story. I’m reading Master Programming , which is a series of interviews with authors of popular languages. They explain what problems they solved and how the language was born - a really cool book.

  • The TIOBE index may give some trend among programming languages, including new ones. I bet that the future lies in a language that will run on top of the JVM or CLR (especially because of the effort put into virtual machines, which are now really great). Concurrency seems to be one of the hottest issues today; therefore, I think we will see some interesting steps in this area (for example, Clojure).

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