
Ask HN: What were the most important new programming languages released in 2017? - aniijbod
No need to give anything like a &#x27;top 5&#x27; etc, but maybe say what was new and what was important about each.
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ilovetux
While it wasn't released in 2017 , I think rust has a lot of promise. Mozilla
used it to vastly improve firefox.

Six months ago I would have said golang, but IMO Google is subject to
constantly increasing scrutiny and their business practices are leading to
developers becoming more wary of adopting their technology products.

Rust, on the other hand, might be able to capitalize on Firefox quantum's
generally positive reception. Fearless concurrency and ownership make rust a
great toolset to take advantage of the increasingly parallel workloads of big-
data. Also, it is a compiled language so it will avoid the bias against
"scripting languages" which is present in certain circles.

Personally, I have started toying around with rust and have found the results
to be quite positive.

~~~
vorg
> golang, but IMO Google [...] business practices are leading to developers
> becoming more wary of adopting their technology products

...but many other developers learnt some Golang _because_ it was backed by a
large IT corp. Never underestimate the lure of CV padding, especially by the
many aptitudally-challenged programmers out there.

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franciscop
Who are the most important people born in 2017? While you can point to some
born from monarchy (big company), the truth is that we are years away from
knowing the answer. Same with programming, just in a smaller timeframe.

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juskrey
How can one measure the importance of a newborn thing? We can say something is
important only when it survives for a while

~~~
aniijbod
Maybe I should have asked:

\- which new languages _look like they might be_ the most important?

\- which languages look the most interesting/surprising/innovative?

\- which are your favorite new languages and why?

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alkonaut
Languages age slowly. Before you heard of it, it’s probaly several years
already. Before it reaches stability and nontrivial adoption it’s often a
decade old.

For “new in 2017” you should probably be looking at research papers for
languages constructed to show off some novel feature. There are people who
plow through almost everything written in type theory and language/compiler
design. I don’t but I’d love to hear a summary of 2017 from the research side
of things, from someone who does.

If I were to mention _one_ language that looks like it’s novel and recent, my
pick would be Microsoft Q#

~~~
AstralStorm
Will it share the fate of the nice but mostly disused F#?

~~~
alkonaut
It will never see even a fraction of the use of F# which is general purpose
and has a _huge userbase_ (if we consider any language in the top 50 as being
huge).

~~~
vram22
Do you know if F# has a good amount of jobs available and contracting opps
available I have been checking it out some and like what I've learned about it
so far.

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TylerJewell
I joined a company, WSO2, as it's CEO earlier this year. Over the past couple
years they have been working on a programming language for integrating and
orchestrating across endpoints. They call it Ballerina. It is at
Ballerinalang.org. it is early stages and the community is starting to grow.
They are doing interesting things around using language syntax to abstract
distributed network resilience issues that you typically require custom logic
or frameworks for.

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AstralStorm
Obviously C++17 and Java 9. Especially the latter with its major enhancement
of standard library.

Other languages are not notable or just tiny updates. Rust is a more
interesting one but there was no major rework in 2017.

~~~
tom_mellior
> Especially the latter with its major enhancement of standard library.

Can you say more about what was enhanced and how?

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ska80
A Language with Dependent Types:

[https://www.idris-lang.org](https://www.idris-lang.org)

~~~
adrianN
Idris has a Wikipedia article since 2013.

~~~
ska80
Version 1.0 was released last April this year.

~~~
justdutch
But that doesn't mean its new. It just means its stable now.

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camus2
Something completely new both released this year and that has reached wide
adoption? I doubt any.

Off topic but it's interesting dinosaurs like Ada or Fortran are actually
making a subtle come back as an alternative to C/C++ or other non-gc languages
such as Rust. Ultimately the need to write native tools that are as fast as
possible because businesses work in a scale never seen before that make even
regular JVM unfit for the job is an interesting turn of events in computing.
This + scientific computing and the democratization of embedded computing.

~~~
tomxor
> Something completely new both released this year and that has reached wide
> adoption? I doubt any

There are many languages before 2017 that never reached wide adoption which
could be considered important.

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tom_mellior
I think Puffs looks like a cool new project:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711767)

Edit: Looks like it was renamed to Wuffs:
[https://github.com/google/wuffs](https://github.com/google/wuffs)

It's a domain-specific language for parsers that should be fast and must be
correct, and it includes relatively light-weight verification.

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0x4f3759df
WebAssembly

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lolive
My question would be: what were the most important programming languages,
paradigms & frameworks YOU happily discovered in 2017?

~~~
lolive
Functional Programming concepts applied to JavaScript (thanks to the
@drboolean book and series of videos at egghead). \+ My first pro project with
Java8. A poor man's programming language for FP gurus, but a real game changer
for the average Java programmer (that I am).

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blowski
I don’t know how to answer that since I can’t even say what are the most
‘important’ programming languages of all time.

~~~
alkonaut
All the current biggest 100 languages are important today. All the thousands
of others are not so important (today). This question is: which if any of new
languages will be (has properties indicating it could be) one of the big ones
in the future?

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synthesissoft
C# 24.0 Lots of cool new features were added!

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augustoruby
The most important is PHP, .NET AND JAVA

