I was listening to a talk the other day and the speaker derisively mentioned “those people who are happy writing Java for the rest of their lives”, and I thought “Am I one of those?” and then I thought “is that a bad thing?”. As part of my “question everything” journey, I decided that it was time, after 10+ years, to have Java report for inspection and force it to defend its title.
I should make it clear, that I am not a language geek, or collector. I generally disagree with “use the right language for the right problem”, I prefer “use the right language for most of your problems”. So far, Java has been that for me. Some things I do in Java are more easily done in other languages, but not so much so that it overtakes the headaches of heterogeneous codebases. If something is really difficult, or impossible in your main language, bring something else in, but keep it simple. I also think it’s fine to have more than one main language, a client of mine is currently transitioning off C#, keeping Java, and adding Python. What they don’t have is random parts of their infrastructure done in erlang or perl or tcl because that’s what someone wanted to use that day.
I could make this task easier and just look at the “marketable” skills out there, which is a small subset. While I think it’s unlikely that there is some forgetten language just waiting for its moment, it’s certainly possible I could find a neat one that’s fun to play with. Languages like Ruby and Python spent years before people could find jobs doing them. So I’m going to look at literally every single language I can find, and put them through a series of tests. If you find a language I haven’t mentioned, let me know and it will be given the same chance as the rest.
Round 1:
The point of this round is to identify languages that have any potential for being useful to me.
Qualifying Criteria
Rule 1. It must be “active”.
This is admitedly a subjective term, but we’ll see how it goes. Simula is clearly not active, while Processing clearly is, with a release only weeks ago.
Rule 2. It must compile and run on modern consumer hardware and operating systems.
This means, at minimum, it works on at least one modern flavor of Linux, because I will want this to run on a server somewhere, and I don’t want a Windows or OS X server, or worse, something obscure. For bonus points, it will also work on Windows 7 and/or OS X.
So, that’s it for now. There are no requirements for web frameworks or lambdas or preference for static versus dynamic typing, I think those elements will play out in later rounds.
- Ada
- Agena
- ALGOL 68
- ATS
- BASIC
- BETA
- Boo
- C
- C#
- C++
- Clean
- Clojure
- COBOL
- Cobra
- Common Lisp
- D
- Diesel
- Dylan
- E
- Eiffel
- Erlang
- F#
- Factor
- Falcon
- Fantom
- FORTH
- Fortran
- GameMonkey Script
- Go
- Groovy
- Haskell
- Icon
- Io
- Ioke
- Java
- JavaScript
- Logo
- Lua
- Maple
- MiniD
- Mirah
- Miranda
- Modula-3
- MUMPS
- Nu
- Objective Caml
- Objective-C
- Pascal
- Perl
- PHP
- Pike
- Processing
- Pure
- Python
- Reia
- Ruby
- Sather
- Scala
- Scheme
- Scratch
- Self
- SPARK
- SQL
- Squeak
- Squirrel
- Tcl
- Tea
- Timber
- Unicon
- Vala
- Visual Basic .NET
This list is actually a LOT longer than I expected, and yes, there actually is a modern version of ALGOL 68. Stay tuned for part 2.