10 up-and-coming programming languages developers should get to know

10 emerging programming languages that developers should know about. Read on to hear more about up-and-coming programming languages that can help career-minded developers get ahead.

There are currently huge numbers of different programming languages in use by software developers, with most jobs requiring the more familiar skills such as Java, JavaScript, PHP and C#. However, as software demands evolve and grow, new and less widely-accepted languages are gaining in prominence, offering developers the right tool for certain jobs.

Predicting which languages will eventually rise to the top of the charts is difficult, of course, but here are 12 languages competing for mind-share that look set to play a bigger role within businesses in coming years, based on data from tech publisher Packt and analysts RedMonk.

1. Google Go

Image: Google

Go, also known as golang, was launched in 2009, having been created by three Google employees - Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson - in 2009.

The open source language is viewed as faster and easier to use than more established languages such as Java and C, from which it is derived.

It is used by a number of organisations, from the BBC to SoundCloud, and Facebook to the UK government award-winning GOV.UK site. It is also used by enterprise software startup du jour, Docker.

“Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language,” its creators say.

2. Julia

Julia is described as a “high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing”.

This makes it good for Hadoop-style parallelism, say its creators, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah, and Alan Edelman.

While it is yet to make a major impact, it is another language that RedMonk has highlighted as growing quickly.

3. Swift

Image: Apple

Swift, revealed at Apple's WWDC conference in 2014, is intended as a replacement for the Objective-C language for OSX and iOS development. Apple made the language open source in December 2015 under the Apache license. That means all of the source code will be available to edit and programs can be made without attributing them to Apple.

Swift - which has similarities to more modern languages like Ruby and Python - has been enjoying “meteoric” growth since launching, according to RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady.

“Swift adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun,” says Apple.

4. Elixir

Image: learni.st

Elixir is defined as a 'functional, concurrent, general-purpose' programming language. It was created in 2012, builds on top of Erlang and is used for web development and building embedded systems. It is used by companies such as Pinterest, Moz and Inverse.

"Its trajectory and functional appeal make it a language to watch, but whether or not Elixir can sustain this momentum is the important question," according to analysts Redmonk in their June 2016 report.

5. Rust

Image: Rust

Created by Mozilla, Rust 1.0 was released in 2014, having been in development for a number of years.

Close in some respects to C and C++, Mozilla describes it as a “new programming language which focuses on performance, parallelisation, and memory safety”.

“By building a language from scratch and incorporating elements from modern programming language design, the creators of Rust avoid a lot of “baggage” (backward-compatibility requirements) that traditional languages have to deal with.”

RedMonk’s O’Grady recently noted: “anecdotal evidence has been accumulating for some time that the language was piquing the interest of developers from a variety of spaces”.

6. Erlang

Image: Erlang Factory

Created by developers at Ericsson two decades ago to run its telephone exchanges, Erlang is a relatively simple programming language designed for large, scalable and high-availability applications.

It garnered little attention outside of the telecoms industry since the mid-nineties, but has grown in prominence in recent years, with a number of high profileusers. WhatsApp, for example, uses Erlang to handle billions of messages sent across its network each day.

7. Scala

Image: Scala

Like Erlang, Scala has been around for slightly longer than most of the other languages featuring on this list. But the functional and object-oriented language – which is highly scalable, hence its name – is continuing to gain ground with well-known organisations.

“You can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do,” says Scala creator, Martin Odersky.

8. Haskell

Image: blog.pusher.com

Haskell calls itself an 'advanced purely-functional programming language'. Its first specifications were published in 1990. It features a type system with type inference and 'lazy evaluation'. It is mainly used within academia but there are some examples of it being used in industry, for example projects within AT&T, BAE Systems, Facebook and even Google. In 2016 a group started compiling the 2020 version of the language.

9. Clojure

Image: Eduonix

Clojure, launched in 2009, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. It is a general-purpose language which emphasises functional programming. It treats code as data and has a macro system, like other 'Lisps'.

It is successfully used in industry by firms like Walmart, Puppet Labs and various big software firms.

10. Lua

Image: Michael Gil/Flickr

Lua was designed in 1993 as a language for extending software applications for customisation. Lua, the Portugese word for 'moon', is described as a cross-platform, 'lightweight multi-paradigm' language mainly designed for embedded systems and clients. It is a very popular language among gaming firms and used for Angry Birds and World of Warcraft, to name just two.