6 Interesting Programming Languages

in programminglanguages •  7 years ago 

Programming Languages

Erlang

This might be an old language, created by the Swedish telecom operator Ericsson, this language the first major language to embrace asynchronous programming with micro processes.

Elixir

This is a more modern language built on top of the virtual machine that Erlang was build on top of.

Prolog

This language is for logic constraint programming, this is the big language in this paradigm, there are other languages to look at here, some of them has many interesting things to offer.

Haskell

This is one of the major purely functional languages, no mutability and complete referential transparency, coupled with a very strong type-system, when you have written something in Haskell and gotten it to behave as you want, and made all the types checkout then it should never throw an error.

Lisp

As some people say "The oldest language of the future"
this has a little truth to it, since there is still things from Lisp that other languages adopt

Clojure

This is a modernised version of Lisp, this however is made to run on top of the JVM, which might make it a little less attractive, or in some cases make it a perfect fit for some projects.

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!
Sort Order:  

I'd like to explore more languages. Some have radically different ways of doing things and that can lead to fresh ideas.

That is true, I could probably write a post about a lot of esoteric languages, or the ones that have been explicitly designed to be bad.

There are silly ones like Brainf**k and Whitespace.

Yes, but there are also terrible languages like intercal, not only a terrible experience to code in, but also dreadfully slow when it runs the program, at least that is what I hear.

You definitely should! Learning new languages is probably my favorite thing when it comes to programming and I try to do it every time I go to a Hackathon. I can definitely say that every time I've learned a new language it's taught me some useful ideas or helped me model ideas better in my head. For example, learning Prolog gives me the tools to plan out really complex rule-based systems on paper very quickly (whereas writing Python pseudocode could take twice as long). This also influences the ways that I write code in other languages; for example, learning Ruby made me rethink the way I program in other object-oriented languages like Java. Instead of using a lot of normal design patterns, I try to write more "DSL" style code and use objects to create literate interfaces. Overall, learning new languages is probably one of the best ways to quickly improve your programming skills.

I appreciate the look at other languages as differences in technology. One of my personal favorites that is out of mainstream is oCaml. Each niche language has a strength into itself typically and that's why it exists. It is also probably the reason why I am fluent in approximately 8 different languages.

Well OCaml is one language, but ML is a whole family of languages, there sure are some interesting things happening there as well.