5 Programming Languages in
2021
Elm is becoming popular within the JavaScript community, primarily among those who prefer functional programming, which is on the rise. Like Babel, TypeScript, and Dart, Elm transpiles to JavaScript.
Rust is a systems programming language meant to replace a lot of C and C++ development—which is why it's surprising to see this language's popularity growing the fastest among web developers. It makes a little more sense when you find out that the language was created at Mozilla, who is looking to give web developers that are forced to write low-level code a better option that's more performant than PHP, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript. Rust was also crowned the "most loved" technology in StackOverflow's 2016 developer survey (meaning it had the most users who wanted to keep using it).
Kotlin has been around for about five years, but it finally reached the production-ready version 1.0 this year. Although it hasn't achieved the popularity of Scala, Groovy, or Clojure—the three most popular and mature (non-Java) JVM langauges—it has separated itself from the myriad other JVM languages and seems poised to take its place among the leaders of this group. It originated at JetBrains—makers of the popular IntelliJ IDEA IDE. So you know it was crafted with developer productivity in mind. Another major reason Kotlin has a bright future—you can easily build Android apps with it.
Crystal is another language that hopes to bring C-like performance into the highly abstracted world of web developers. Crystal is aimed at the Ruby community, with a syntax that is similar to and, at times, identical to Ruby's. As the already large number of Ruby-based startups continues to grow, Crystal could play a key role in helping take those applications' performance to the next level.
Elixir also takes a lot of inspiration from the Ruby ecosystem, but instead of trying to bring C-like benefits, it's focused on creating high-availability, low-latency systems—something Rails has had trouble with, according to critics. Elixir achieves these performance boosts by running on the Erlang VM, which has a strong performance reputation built over its 25 years in the telecom industry. The Phoenix application framework for Elixir—more than any piece of this blooming ecosystem—has given this language legs.
