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A beginner's guide to learning new programming languages
Rust or Ruby? Go or Groovy? As the competitive IT landscape evolves, developers can enhance their skills and career potential by learning new programming languages.
As IT systems evolve, AI coding tools grow in usage and languages rise and fall in popularity, developers might struggle to determine which new programming languages they should focus on learning. A proactive, mix-and-match approach can help a developer gain speed and proficiency for working with new technologies while also enhancing their career potential and opportunities for advancement. Get started with this selection of seven popular languages and a rundown of the compelling features driving adoption.
How to choose a new programming language
A developer can obtain a better grasp of software engineering by taking a broad approach to language acquisition. Reasons to adopt a new language might include a desire to expand one's toolbox, achieve greater versatility to solve technical issues or gain access to specific platform development.
One useful method for choosing a new language is to first consider unfamiliar languages. Developers can pick one language from three different classes: functional, object-oriented (OOP) and memory-managed. Alternatively, a developer could choose one native language, one managed language and one interpreted language, such as Rust, C# and Python. The primary goal of this exercise is to challenge preconceptions and rote ways of programming. A Java-based developer, for example, could capitalize on the synergy between Java and the high-level programming language Kotlin by adding it to their Java-based apps to further expand functionality. The same rationale can extend to other languages, like leveraging one's knowledge of C++ to ease the learning curve for Go.
Programming language popularity and the danger of obsolescence
It's important to consider the possibility of language obsolescence when choosing a new language for adoption. Take, for example, PHP's decline in popularity. First introduced in 1995, the general-purpose scripting language forms the basis of the web infrastructure as we currently know it. In the early 1990s, developers built websites for numerous applications with minimal client-side logic, but today, single-page applications dominate with hundreds of front-end libraries. This transformation led to the rise of Django, a high-level Python framework for building database-backed web applications. In addition to faster development times, Django is crucial for building applications that can handle the complexity of distributed services. In contrast, PHP lacks these capabilities and, as a reflection of its limitations, recently ranked seventeenth on the April 2024 TIOBE Index -- its lowest position since the index first started tracking language popularity in 2001.
7 popular languages and key attributes
Newer languages offer myriad coding solutions, from simplifying API implementations to providing built-in support for concurrency, microservices or cloud-native application builds. But new doesn't always mean better, and every programming language has its own set of strengths and limitations.
Unranked and appearing in alphabetical order, this reference list offers a selection of current languages -- established, conventional choices that have sustained support (Rust, Ruby, Python) and emerging languages that continue to rise in popularity (Go, Kotlin, Groovy, Elixir) -- and details some of the compelling features driving adoption.
1. Elixir
Elixir is a functional language that's effective for web-based or distributed services. It builds on capabilities found in both Kotlin and Erlang, offering development speed, high fault tolerance and concurrency to scale projects quickly. However, developers might find it difficult to resolve coding questions due to the small community.
2. Go
Effective for back-end programming, web services and API creation, Go offers clean syntax and uniform code structure to ease the learning process. As a type-safe language, it uses only authorized memory locations. Developers can simplify their code by grouping items of different types into a single type to ease the build process and improve reliability. Go also uses concurrency to execute functions asynchronously and eliminates the need to write app-specific drivers and plugins so developers can spend more time on application logic and troubleshooting. It entered the top 10 of the TIOBE index in March 2023 and hit No. 7, its highest position on the list, in June 2024.
3. Groovy
Apache Groovy supports object-oriented and functional styles as well as imperative and declarative programming. It connects with a rich set of frameworks, including Grails, a full-stack framework for web development; Spring Boot, for creating microservices; and Micronaut, for building serverless applications. As an alternative language for the Java virtual machine (JVM), it provides an effective scripting language for those new to the Java platform. Experienced programmers can achieve faster development times using the compiler command line tool to compile Groovy sources into bytecode.
4. Kotlin
Kotlin is a statically typed language with clean syntax, safety and Java class interoperability through the JVM. The language offers functional programming features and patterns as well as type classes, data types and integration specifics to improve code reusability. Kotlin streamlines the build process, reduces code size for better error detection and eliminates programming issues through easy domain-specific language creation. Due to its coding features, libraries and build times, Kotlin continues to attract a growing number of contributors.
5. Python
With logical syntax, readable code and sophisticated development features, Python is an object-oriented programming language that functions as glue code for server-side scripting -- the key to its success for front- and back-end builds. Programmers can simplify their development processes using the Django framework for repeatability and extensive automation. However, interpreter overhead can result in slow compile times with system call lags and high memory consumption. And while the language may be less effective for mobile app builds, the Python community actively contributes new tools and libraries to expand those features.
6. Ruby
Publicly released in 1995, Ruby adopts key concepts and features from Perl, Smalltalk and Lisp and runs on many platforms, including Unix, MacOS and Windows. The Ruby on Rails framework simplifies front-end and server-side builds with support scripts, database back-ends and libraries. Ruby offers custom shell commands, application wrappers and rapid application prototyping. Developers can use its object-oriented approach to assign certain properties within the code and designate specific actions to take. However, minimal documentation can pose challenges to understanding program behavior, and its boot speed is uniformly slow, which impacts performance.
7. Rust
As a compiled systems programming language, Rust offers C-like efficiency with strong static typing, type inference and functional language features to control memory and mitigate security issues. The first stable release debuted in 2015, and Rust developers can take advantage of microservices due to its built-in support for concurrency. According to the "2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey," Rust remains the most admired language for the eighth year in a row.
Kerry Doyle has written about technology, business and higher education for a variety of publications and organizations. His current focus is on issues relevant to IT and enterprise leaders across a range of topics, from nanotech to the cloud to microservices.
