Modern Programming Languages

Programming languages are the basic tool of a software developer. The possibilities of the language determine the way of thinking, the effort and the productivity and therefore the time to market.

There are thousands of general purpose programming languages to choose from, there are even more domain specific programming languages and there are also modeling languages.

The question "What programming language should be used?" is difficult to answer. Nowadays computer systems consist of different parts that typically are programmed in their "own" language: the database in SQL, the web pages in JavaScript, the application back end in Java, etc.

From my experience i learned that

• a) this distinction often is not fine grained enough and
• b) the commonly used languages like e.g. Java or C++ are not powerful enough to allow rapid application development.

But there are solutions.

• a) it is often advantageous to use more specialized languages, for example to implement the business logic in a domain specific language. This gives the business analysts the possibility to understand and maintain the business definitions.
• b) a lot of developments from modern programming languages have been incorporated into the mainstream languages, for example generic types, list comprehensions, iterators. But there still are a few concepts missing, e.g. lambda abstractions aka closures in Java or dynamic types.

Therefore i am always interested in new programming languages that will increase my productivity, increase the readability and maintainability of the code and last but not least make programming fun.

There are some practitioners and theorists, that do believe that the usage of different specialized languages has come. Some call it polyglot programming while others call it language oriented programming.

Some new languages with innovative concepts have been invented and are gaining momentum. I am mainly interested/working with the following languages.

• Groovy
• Haskell
• Ruby

See also my overview page for other languages.

The following are success stories of these innovative languages.

• The most widely known is probably Ruby and the Ruby on Rails web development framework.
• Functional programming languages are build on mathematical foundations, are often teached in universities and are increasingly used in industry as seen in the real world success stories.
  • The first version Pugs of the new Perl6 language was implemented in Haskell. The main developer gave an interview on his experiences.
  • Researchers at Business Objects Labs created the Open Quark Framework for rapid application development. The main component of this framework is the language CAL which has "many similarities with Haskell" as the researchesr say.
  • The unison file synchronizer is written in OCaml.
  • The development teams of the Linux distributions Linspire/Freespire use Haskell for their development.
  • Haskell was the "Language of the Year 2002" of the Pragmatic Programmers.
• Well, the web page on success stories of Groovy is empty at the moment. But there are some entries for the web application framework Grails. And
  • Groovy won the JAX Innovation Award 2007 as the most innovative and creative project.
  • Groovy won the 2004 JCP Awards as the most innovative JSR for the J2SE/J2EE platform.
  • There were quite a few articles in german magazines on Groovy in recent times: iX, JavaSpectrum, Java Magazin and LinuxEnterprise
  • The Project Zero, an IBM project to create the next generation of dynamic web applications, choose Groovy and PHP as their scripting languages.
  • The Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) provides integrated support for Groovy.
  • And last but not least Groovy is my programming language of choice at the time of writing ;-)