Current Trends
Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Some of the current trends include:
- Increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially, including pure functional programming for making code easier to reason about and easier to parallelise (at both micro- and macro- levels)
- Constructs to support concurrent and distributed programming.
- Mechanisms for adding security and reliability verification to the language: extended static checking, information flow control, static thread safety.
- Alternative mechanisms for modularity: mixins, delegates, aspects.
- Component-oriented software development.
- Metaprogramming, reflection or access to the abstract syntax tree
- Increased emphasis on distribution and mobility.
- Integration with databases, including XML and relational databases.
- Support for Unicode so that source code (program text) is not restricted to those characters contained in the ASCII character set; allowing, for example, use of non-Latin-based scripts or extended punctuation.
- XML for graphical interface (XUL, XAML).
- Open source as a developmental philosophy for languages, including the GNU compiler collection and recent languages such as Python, Ruby, and Squeak.
- AOP or Aspect Oriented Programming allowing developers to code by places in code extended behaviors.
- Massively parallel languages for coding 2000 processor GPU graphics processing units and supercomputer arrays including OpenCL
Some important languages developed during this period include:
- 2000 - ActionScript
- 2001 - C#
- 2001 - Visual Basic .NET
- 2002 - F#
- 2003 - Groovy
- 2003 - Scala
- 2003 - Factor
- 2007 - Clojure
- 2009 - Go
- 2011 - Dart
Read more about this topic: History Of Programming Languages
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