Emerging Programming Languages

C++, Java, Python, and other established programming languages may yet be with us for a long time, but our current software development landscape has given rise to new languages that benefit from the lessons learned over decades of programming. In this report, you’ll examine six of the fastest-growing programming languages: Crystal, Elixir, Elm, Julia, Kotlin, and Rust.

The O’Reilly editorial team covers the issues that drive modern language development and provides an overview of each language’s origins, features, usage, and trends. You’ll learn the answers to several key questions: Why are these languages important to software developers and the programming community? What makes them good at challenging other, more established languages? What problems do they solve for programmers and software architects?

This report examines:

• Issues addressed by these modern languages such as concurrency, visibility, environment, syntax, robustness, data types, and functions
• The purpose that motivated each language’s creation, as well as choices and trade-offs made in the process
• Unique features that each language offers to programmers
• What their rapid rise reveals about the shifting ecosystem