Programming trends: Modern languages gaining ground

18 november, 2021. – The list of programming languages and protocols on the market is growing, which makes it difficult to choose the most suitable one for a specific project or application. Some of the emerging languages are particularly modern and simple, but they are able to compete with those already established in the sector. In addition, there is another factor to take into account: the software development industry is booming and a huge percentage of new developers are entering the sector, so the simplest and easiest to develop programming languages will tend to be the most popular, causing the traditional ones to lose market share.

Softtek, a global provider of next-generation digital transformation services and solutions, summarises some of the languages that are gaining popularity in its reportNext-Gen Software: Languages & Tools:

• Rust: It is a language whose aim is to implement applications or operating systems related to Windows, Linux or macOS. It is an open source project that also allows programming web applications on a smaller scale than traditional languages. It is a low-level language, very abstract, whose first use case was the development of the Firefox browser. A key feature of this language is that it prevents code damage if an error occurs, i.e. it provides security and reliability in the area of error handling, as it guarantees memory protection. For the past five years, it has been the top-rated programming language according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
• Kotlin: It is a pragmatic language, mainly object-oriented, designed to work with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Android. It is open source, simple and easy to use and stands out for its security and clarity. In addition, it reduces the number of lines of code by approximately 40% compared to other languages, saving resources and costs. The great advantage of Kotlin are the corrutinas, which allow to handle threads in the background in a very simple and much more powerful way than in traditional ways, increasing the productivity of developers. It is the second most popular programming language in the JVM ecosystem, and in previous years Google has declared it the language of choice for Android app developers.
• Golang: Also known as Go, it is the new open source programming language created by Google. It is characterised by being simple, with a very simple vocabulary and a fast and easy learning curve. It is mainly used for web servers, data pipelines and machine learning applications. It is a very powerful language with very high performance, as its compiler directly passes the written code to machine code, being totally object-oriented. It also has a rubbish collector, reflection functions and cross-compilation. With many improvements planned for the release of Go 2, it will become even more popular in the future.
• Swift: It was created in 2014 by Apple for iPhone and iPad applications, and has now come to replace C-based languages (C, C++ and Objective-C) as the main language of Mac, IOS, Apple TV and Apple Watch. This open source language is characterised by its simplicity, versatility and practical applications. It is also fast, secure and easy to learn

“Python and JavaScript have dominated the programming language market for some time now, and continue to gain more and more popularity. But older languages have the baggage of the past and cannot move fast enough (Java) or become even more cumbersome as they add more and more features (C++). This is not the case with newer languages that can meet the demand of today’s developers. Most of them focus on developer ergonomics and support modern features such as type inference, null safety, expressiveness or brevity. Many of them are also designed to take advantage of modern hardware and infrastructure (Cloud, Multi-Core, GPU, TPU).””, says Rafael Conde, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Softtek EMEA.