Sunday, January 8, 2012

10 Programming Languages That Could Shake Up IT

Ten cutting-edge programs aim to address a specific problem or a unique shortcoming of the more popular languages. Google's Dart is similar to JavaScript in that it uses C-like syntax and keywords, but objects in Dart are defined in classes and interfaces, as in C++ or Java. Ceylon, developed by Red Hat's Gavin King, aims to solve the problems associated with Java. There will be no Ceylon virtual machine, and the Ceylon compiler will output Java bytecode that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Go is a general-purpose programming language that is suitable for development and systems programming. F# is based on .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR), which means it can access all of the same libraries and features as other CLR languages. Opa aims to eliminate traditional programming languages by proposing a new paradigm for Web programming. The Opa compiler decides whether a given routine should run on the client, server, or both, and it outputs code accordingly. X10, developed by IBM Research, handles concurrency using the partitioned global address space programming model. Chapel, part of Cray's Cascade Program, is a high-performance computing initiative that aims to develop abstract parallel algorithms from the underlying hardware.