5 programming languages we can see being born right now

Kevin Da Silva
4 min readJul 11, 2022

--

This weekend, I binge-watched a ton of videos from YouTube channels about programming languages, and some new programming languages I'm seeing being born on Github. I have to say that besides the IT market has become insane, the jobs are in general using the same tedious technologies for the most part of companies instead of the hipster stuff, as a hobby programming is such an amazing thing and It's so cool to see the huge variety of languages and tools we have available, and It's even more incredible to watch languages being born every day on Github.

So the intent of this article is to list some languages that aren't on their 1.0 version yet, but that certainly deserve some attention from our side.

Please also notice that “being born” in this article means a language that is still on a version less than 1.0, but it should not stop you from building anything on them because in general they are as complete as many mainstream programming languages.

But first, let's recap a little about the languages we use nowadays, most part of the languages that are used in the market were picked because of the influence of big techs wanting to lock in companies and sell stuff to them, like .NET, Typescript efforts from Microsoft, Java from Sun/Oracle, and the others for its killer apps like browsers were JS shines till today, PHP with WordPress, Python with data science, etc.

And then the hardware changed, and more cores were added to a processor, and using those previous popular languages in general means throwing in the thrash processing power or adding layers of unsafe code in your software, so a new batch of languages rose to try to overcome this issue, Elixir, Rust, Clojure, Go, Scala just to name a few.

And well the job market didn't cared much about wasting computing power and remained using the same stuff as always, the only one who got relatively popular was Go in my opinion not just because Go is a pretty good language but because of Google’s influence/reputation (The language is incredible and has a very good concurrency model, but the others mentioned have it too, please don't kill me);

And now there are tons of languages being born to tackle specific topics, and here's our list:

grain logo

GRAIN

Grain is a functional language that seems to me like a mix between JavaScript and a little ML and is focused on compiling to web assembly to be able to run multiplatform

zig logo

ZIG

Zig is a system's language but in a general way simpler than Rust(also not as safe), Zig doesn't have the shoot in the foot from C and C++, what makes it a suitable option if you are not considering any of the three mentioned alternatives

Also, there's a buzz around about bun, a JavaScript runtime built in Zig that is faster than node and deno.

v logo

V

V is a general-purpose programming language that also can be a systems language, the website says that it is so simple you can learn in a weekend, it also says that GO programmers will be very familiar with the language because V uses many aspects of GO.

V’s website also has some benchmarks on disk space and compilation time that look very impressing

factor lang

FACTOR

From all the languages mentioned I believe Factor is the oldest, it appeared in 2003, but its current version is still less than 1.0, so I will include this one as being born.

Factor is a stack language, meaning that every element and function call behaves as a stack like:

[ 4 ]
-----
[ + ]
-----
[ 3 ]
outputs an error because + function was called for two elements and theres only one number on the stack
[ + ]
-----
[ 5 ]
-----
[ 4 ]
-----
[ 3 ]
outputs 9 because plus function was applied to the previous 5 and 4 elements, generating a final stack of
[ 9 ]
-----
[ 3 ]

GLEAM

Gleam is a typed language for the Erlang virtual machine, gleam syntax seems very elegant and simple for a typed language, and would be cool to see Gleam succeed as much as Elixir succeeded

These were just a few new languages that are available for us to try, but there are many others out there that I would have material to write a part two of this article for sure.

Thank you! Hope to see you in the next one

--

--

Kevin Da Silva

I'm a back-end developer, functional programming lover, fascinated by computer science and languages. From the south part of Brazil to the world