History of Programming Languages - Current Trends

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

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