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Programming Languages To Learn In 2020 To Boost Your Career As A Software Developer

Zaiste on December 17, 2019

As famously stated by Ludwig Wittgenstein: « The limits of my language means the limits of my world ». He was referring to natural languages, but t...
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Vitaliy Zarubin

Kotlin

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Scott Hutchinson

F#

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Zaiste

I have a deep admiration for F#, and for ML languages overall. I was in fact debating between Reason and F# and eventually went with the former. F# is without a doubt a great candidate to learn in 2020!

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Scott Simontis

Definitely F# over Reason. F# may be a small, tight-knit community, but Reason just seems dead. Libraries seem to be going stale faster than new, innovative ones are released.

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Willyboar

I was tried Nim 2 months ago and I think I will stick with it.
You can be productive in the very first days. Nim is cross-platform and recently hit v.1.0.0 (currently 1.0.4).
The community is quite small but very helpful with a family atmosphere around.

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Zaiste

Great to hear that! What's your primary programming language? I'm curious about your experience learning Nim

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Willyboar • Edited

I am not a professional developer. I am a hobbyist web developer.
I started with PHP, then Ruby and Rails and the last Python. Then I became curious about compiled languages. I tried a little from rust, go, crystal but found Nim was better for me. I would love helping to improve the web dev area of Nim.

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Andrei Dascalu

Almost totally agree with the list. Rust is on my list too, though I am puzzled to see Rust and not Go as well, since concurrency gets mentioned.

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Zaiste

I feel Rust is (just slightly) underrated while Go is very popular. At least that's my impression, e.g. many of my friends use Go regularly, but there are only a few who use Rust. In the article I wanted to promote those less popular languages according to my sentiment.

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satheesh

How about golang , wasn't not faster than rust ?

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Steven Trotter

Golang faster than Rust? I'd be amazed if that's true given Go's GC vs Rusts static memory management. Do you have any sources to support that statement? I'm not being aggressive, I'm happy to be proven wrong, but if you're making a statement like that it needs some backup. A quick Google certainly disagrees: benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.n...

Though there are good reasons to choose go above rust (and vice versa) speed I don't think is one of them.

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Zaiste

For the speed it may depend how you measure it. For me, golang is very popular right now. The idea for the article was to promote (more or less) emerging languages. golang is a great language nonetheless

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Yuriy Markov

Cool article! Thank you! 👍
PS
You have a typo "pwoerful" 🙃

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Zaiste

Fixed. Thank you!

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rodol

Another typo: "lanaguage"

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Yuriy Markov

I've missed this one! Thank you! 👍

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Yuriy Markov

You're welcome!

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ahmedabdo97

What about Julia rarely see anyone talks about it

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Zaiste

Initially I wanted to include Julia, but then I just decided to keep the list short. Julia needs more attention, indeed. I should add it to the list. FYI Stefan Karpinski was at PolyConf in 2015.

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rodol

ATS! I am currently studying it. It is one of a kind. Functional programming with performance competitive with that of C, built upon dependent types, theorem proving, and linear types. There are loads of cool features, and it is being actively developed.

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Hayder Sharhan

Are you seriously not mentioning Kotlin?

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lesha 🟨⬛️

And mentioning dart for some reason

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Miłosz Tadrzak

There are a loads of not-mentioned-programming-languages out there.
Why do you think Kotlin should be listed?

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MiAn • Edited

Its on my list to investigate Kotlin to modify Swift code for iOS ( and MacOS ) projects for Android

I've given up on Flutter. It messes with my mind too much and when I'm checking back and forth what native code it produced. It's actually faster to maintain 2 codebases.

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Hayder Sharhan • Edited

I mention kotlin in particular because it's still a new language. A new language that has already taken over Java in the realm of Android and is on its way to become the go-to language of the mobile world with kottlin multiplatform.

Pivotal has already announced they fully support kotlin for spring framework with DSLs and documentation and other ways. This means that new server side applications are going to be written in kotlin, not Java. And many old applications will be converted over.

In the realm of native compilation, kotlin native is already making its way to rasberry pi and also into mobile optimizations that better run natively than in jvm.

Finally, KotlinJS is still early but has huge potential to allow us to program webpages in kotlin then transpile to js. Which means full stack kotlin could very much be a reality in the coming years. Notable projects are create-kotlin-react-app which allows us to create react apps with full kotlin DSL. Another project that can lift this up to the sky is Dukat which would allow automatic interface generation for typescript libraries in kotlin!

So my friend milosz, would any other language compete with kotlin in terms of future career boosting!?

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nam giang

One thing common in all posts of this type is that I don't understand what problems are these new fancy languages trying to solve!

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Eldar E.

True!

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Jarod Stewart

These are great for 2020! Thanks for this list and the run downs 👍

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Patrice Gauthier

Sad to not see Elixir mentioned.
Here in this case if you learn Rust and Elixir, you can also invoke Rust from Elixir using Rustler. You get an already fast fail-safe distributed system that can take advantage of Rust.

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tastyminerals

The article title it is a typical clickbait and these languages of course won't boost your career or help to land a good job. If you mention functional languages where is Scala? Scala is in high demand and well paid almost everywhere. Reason? First time I hear about it. Dart, Nim? Nimrod is not an emerging language, it has been there for quite some time and never got much traction and for a reason. Neither will help you to find a good job :) Rust? but again where, Mozilla? Maybe you initially wanted to list the less known languages but then also mention D whose C++ interop is better than Nim. Oh boy, dev.to these days.

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Hugo

I've been looking for a new programming language to learn. Right now. I only know JavaScript and I was thinking about giving a try to Elixir or Go

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Zaiste

Both are excellent choices. If you are still hesitating, I'd encourage you to start with Elixir.

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Ali Almohsen

Nice list, thanks for the article! In 2020,I hope to learn Reason and further my experience with Go.

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Steven Trotter

Great article, I'll check out some of the languages I don't know. Thanks.

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Y.Shepard

Sorry, but Dart? Seriously? In my opinion Dart become completely unnecessary after es6,7 and especially typescript were introduced.

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B_aaS • Edited

I strongly disagree with this. With Flutter, Dart will never become unnecessary. Have you seen the widespread adoption of flutter as the goto for cross platform mobile development?

The language in itself draws most of its concepts and relevance from existing languages, but this doesn't make it redundant. It makes it a potential replacement.

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Eldar E.

IMO, Dart is a deprecated swift/kotlin, and it’s a poor language for Flutter.

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Rajesh Gauswami

I was thinking that i will get node in list.but disappointed any reason for not including it.

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Norbert Sándor • Edited

"node" as a programming language? :D

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Gernot Gradwohl

I am experimenting with Elm right now and think it is really awesome so far!

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0xd34df00d

Idris? :]

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Me

So. Many. Languages.

Frustrating.

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Bryan Baldwin
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MiAn

There was a saying in the Forth community in the '80s. If you've seen one Forth you've . . . seen one Forth.

Joy sounds like one of them.

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intermundos

Interesting, interesting list.

But where is Crystal in this list?

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