Modern Programming Languages

Programming languages are the basic tool of a software developer. The possibilities of the language determine the way of thinking, the effort and the productivity and therefore the time to market. There are thousands of general purpose programming languages to choose from, there are even more domain specific programming languages and there are also modeling languages.

The question "What programming language(s) should be used? Should more than one languages be used?" is difficult to answer and depends on the project and the skills of its members. There are some practitioners and theorists, that do believe that it is better to use different specialized languages. Some call it polyglot programming while others call it language oriented programming.

Erlang

Erlang is a concurrent programming language with a functional language as it's core, strict evaluation and dynamic typing. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, concurrent systems and has been used esp. in the telecommunications area.

Groovy

Groovy is an agile dynamically typed language extension of Java. See my page on Groovy.

Fortress

Fortress is brand new specification of a next generation programming language specifically designed for high performance computing (HPC). It is very innovative, for example it is component based and provides an extensible syntax. A reference implementation is available.

Haskell

Haskell is a purely functional programming language. I wrote my diploma thesis about the implementation of geometrical algorithms in this language. Haskell 98 is now 10 years old, but i still consider it as modern. See my page on Haskell.

Python

Python is a multi-paradigm programming language that ´ incorporates imperative, functional and object-oriented features. Python has a dynamic type system.

Ruby

Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented language. See my page on Ruby.

Scala

Scala is a statically typed multi-paradigm programming language, that integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. It is integrated into Java and .NET.

Java

In the early nineties i dreamed of a interpretated language similiar to C++, because the development cycle at that time was painfully slow: code, compile, run, crash (because of a pointer or memory allocation error) and reboot ;-). And then Java arrived. Java is more than 14 years old, but it evolved and I still like to program in Java. And there never has been such a huge code library for a single programming language before.

C++

A new version of C++ called C++0x will be released this year or next year. There is an exciting library for C++, called Boost.

Gödel

Goedel named after the logician Kurt Gödel is a declarative logic programming language and is/was much more modern than Prolog. It is strongly typed, provides parametric polymorphism, has a module system and a finite domain constraint solver. An example program can be found here.

λProlog

λProlog is a logical programming language with lambda terms, unification of lambda terms and various other logical features, e.g. hereditary Harrop formulas ;-).

Perl

Perl is a language that incorporates features of a lot of languages and tools from the 80ies and 90ies (sed, awk, C, shell scripting and Lisp). It was my all purpose scripting and prototyping language for years. The language caught my interest again recently with the book Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus. But newer languages provide the features described in the book in a better way. When Perl6 is finished, i will look into it again. If you want to test Perl6, you can do so here.

Various old programming languages

Basic, C, Eiffel, Forth, GFA Basic, Lisp, Logo, Pascal, Prolog, Scheme, Smalltalk, Turbo Pascal

• Programming Language Research at Carnegie Mellon University (outdated)
• Dictionary of Programming Languages (outdated)
• Lambda the Ultimate The Programming Languages Weblog
• The Computer Language Benchmarks Game