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
Famous quotes containing the words current and/or trends:
“If the current is right, one can drift to success.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)