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Programming Languages You'll Need Next Year (and Beyond)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Over at Dice, there's a breakdown of the programming languages that could prove most popular over the next year or two, including Apple's Swift, JavaScript, CSS3, and PHP. But perhaps the most interesting entry on the list is Erlang, an older language invented in 1986 by engineers at Ericsson. It was originally intended to be used specifically for telecommunications needs, but has since evolved into a general-purpose language, and found a home in cloud-based, high-performance computing when concurrency is needed. "There aren't a lot of Erlang jobs out there," writes developer Jeff Cogswell. "However, if you do master it (and I mean master it, not just learn a bit about it), then you'll probably land a really good job. That's the trade-off: You'll have to devote a lot of energy into it. But if you do, the payoffs could be high." And while the rest of the featured languages are no-brainers with regard to popularity, it's an open question how long it might take Swift to become popular, given how hard Apple will push it as the language for developing on iOS.
I've been writing software for a good 18 years now and I've never been limited by not knowing CSS. However, if I reach that limit I'm pretty sure I can pick it up like every other programming or markup language that I've needed.
Please, no more Erlang world domination news.
I went through that 3 years ago already. We had a project that a fanatic asked us to rewrite in Erlang.
it took 9 months with 2.5 people.
Tons of issues, mostly with very lacking library support, tooling. Obnoxious stuck up community too.
In one case, I had a guy tell me online "hire me as an Erlang consultant and then I will help you".
In the end we set screw it (once the Erlang fanatic left).
We rewrote this 9 months of Erlang development in 3 weeks (!) using one senior Java developer.
it worked like a charm and still runs flawlessly in production today.
Erlang = HYPE
Everything is immutable is beautiful for fairy tales, but not for real-life software (trying building a DOM in a language which is 100% immutable).
All modern languages have learned from Erlang's mistake. They do immutable by default, but allow mutable if there is a need for it (e.g. Ceylon, Rust, etc)
Next year, the languages you'll need will still be C, C++ and Java. Maybe some C#, Python or Bash. The year after that, you'll still be using C, C++, and Java. Maybe some C#, Python or Bash.
By 2020, the main difference is that you'll be working with machine-learning DSLs and libraries to program/train memristor based devices. But you'll still be using C, C++, and Java. Maybe some C#, Python or Bash.
Sure, but a programmer that doesn't know CSS is pretty limited!
A _web developer_ maybe, but a _programmer_ surely isn't.
C. Plain old C.
Entire Operating Systems are written in it. Userland tools for those operating systems are usually written in it. Any self-respecting developer knows at least C. The rest is just like fashion tips: next year they're outdated.
Although, as much as I hate to admit it, the same could be said for Java...
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.