What programming languages and language features are under 10? [closed]

Answer 1

None, that I've seen.

Sure, there are "new" languages popping up all the time. But I used the scare-quotes because all the examples usually offered are:

• repackaging (into another language) ideas that have been in Computing Science and Mathematics for decades, or
• languages/techniques which are older than that, but only recently "discovered" by the "mainstream" world.

For concrete examples:

• Lambda calculus goes back to Mathematics and logic in the 1930s,
• functional programming goes back to LISP in the late 1950s,
• John Backus discussed FP in his 1977 Turing Award lecture (pdf),
• John Hughes' paper Why Functional Programming Matters was written in 1984,
• comprehensions go back to set theory in the 1870s and SETL in the 1960s,
• parser combinators were promoted by Phil Wadler in the mid 1980s and go back to combinatory logic in the 1920s,
• and so on.

The work of promoting, popularizing, applying, and refining these (and many other) important ideas is worthwhile. But that doesn't make those uses truly innovative.

Of course, I will be delighted if anyone can provide an example of a truly original concept in programming that didn't exist ten years ago.

Answer 2

OMeta is less than 2 years old and is a language for creating other languages. In my opinion, it's more expressive than languages like Microsoft's upcoming MGrammar.

The coolest idea it has is that you can create languages in an object-oriented fashion (e.g. you could create a mashup language of Ruby and C# grammars).

It's also nice that the syntax looks almost identical to BNF and thus quite readable.

I wrote more about it here.

Answer 3

Ok, we know Code Contracts since Eiffel - so that's 20+ years, and Code Analysis for years and years, but I have never seen such a complete combination of Code Contracts, Code Analysis and Unit Testing as in c# 4.0 and Pex. Maybe I'm wrong and ignorant about other languages and products that did offer that level of functionality years ago - but I surely would call that degree of help towards "bugfree" software a feature. So, is it new?

Answer 4

I don't think the recent innovation has been inventing new features. It's been making old ideas available (and practical) in mainstream settings. Lambda expressions are a great example of this - old as the hills, but the vast majority of developers won't have encountered them before C# 3 and VB9.

Similarly, two features may have existed independently before, but never in the same language. I wouldn't like to start claiming which combinations are new, but it's worth considering.

Is the nature of .NET generics "new" by the way? I don't know enough computing history to say, but there are clear differences between it and either Java generics (with type erasure) or C++ templates (where the specialization is really a compile-time business as far as I can tell, requiring the source for the template).

Answer 5

The E language made light-weight promise pipelining accessible. This ought to be a crucial idea for the upcoming multi-core revolution, as it makes it possible to write code that's easily parallelized, has low-cost dependencies between communicating sub-processes, and sidesteps all the standard problems with managing locks and avoiding deadlock. The main ideas in E have been ported to a variety of other languages. E is part of a long (though somewhat obscure) line of object capability languages, which has some very important contributions to make in software robustness and security. E is just about 10 years old now.

Answer 6

The AgentSpeak(L) language for programming intelligent agents. It is based on Prolog (which is very old) but there is some very specific features, and it's brand new.

You can check a fully interpreter called Jason.