I haven't exactly been keeping up with the state of the art as far as promising new programming languages are concerned. That said, i do have a general interest in exotic or languages that have cool features. I do aspire to create my own programming language one day, just because i think that'd be awesome.
In the mean time though i figured we'd get a list going.
Pretty sure most of you are familiar with
Crystal. Crystal is kind of nice since the syntax is a lot like Ruby which makes the syntax feel pretty intuitive. That is if you're familiar with Ruby of course, personally Ruby and Crystal come naturally since Python was the first programming language i learned. And while definitely different in some regards, Ruby is mostly just Python with more opportunities for semantic errors.
This next one is probably my favorite of the bunch. It's called
Nim, and it's kind of an oddball but in the best way possible.
Nim combines the best of Python, Rust, Modula, Ada, and has a package manager that works much like NPM for NodeJS. Nim is a multi-platform compiled systems language. The syntax will look familiar to you if you are familiar with python and Node, not an exact one to one, but pretty intuitive regardless.
Interestingly it's kind of like a meta language. A JS backend is provided for client and server targeting. It wraps C, C++, and Objective C, allowing it to make use of libraries native to those langs, vastly increasing it's capabilities. And it comes with a small core that is easily extendable.
A Nim core program looks like this:
Pretty neat if you ask me. What's more, Nim has a pretty rich Package/Library ecosystem. Which definitely will make your life a lot easier if you decide to try your hand at it.
Lastly, i recently found out about
Dart and after looking into it, i can definitely see it's value. The syntax closely resembles C, i'd almost go as far as to say it's basically simplified C. Besides being fast, it's also compatible with all platforms including mobile and can even be compiled to JS for web app development.
The only thing that i'm a bit meh about is that it's optimized for UI and really designed to make apps for end-users. Obviously i enjoy programming, but my over-arching interest isn't making slick looking apps for end users, ya dig. Although if i do ever need to make a slick looking app that's user friendly i think i would prefer using Dart to having to use Qt and C++.
Anyway that's my preliminary list, if you have any langs to add please do so. Thanks guys.
EDIT: Fixed indentation on Nim program sample.