The year is coming to its end, and it has been an interesting year in the world of programming languages. I’m going to explore what new and exciting developments have happened in the past year or so and what is my favorite language so far. Note that this is all my subjective experience and opinion and thus should not be taken all that seriously.
The world of web
Let’s be honest, modern day web development is a mess. There are 100+ different frameworks out there which all suck. The one that sucks the least is Svelte, and they introduced runes this year. I’m still not certain what I think of them but at least that’s something new. I don’t really follow nor care about other frameworks. React is still the hot garbage it has always been.
On the other hand a fascinating way of avoiding having to write JavaScript is htmx. I have to admit that I really love the idea as someone who appreciates simplicity. It’s especially great combo with Go and templ for a modern web app development.
Moving away from the HTTP, Gemini is as unadopted as ever. It is quite sad what the modern web has become with all the centralization and bloat but what can you do. Gemini is the best alternative available at the moment, but to be honest, I doubt it will ever get adopted.
Getting low
C++23 is indescribably atrocious mess of a language. They never learn, do they? C++ is still adopting new features from other modern languages like Rust but doesn’t deprecate things anywhere near as quickly. Just the Wikipedia page for C++23 alone is bigger that the whole C language specification. And speaking of C, there is going to be a few new features and some old syntax is getting finally deprecated. As per usual you can read the details from the Wikipedia article.
Google is making some efforts to create their own C++ killer language 2000®, Carbon. It seems awfully similar to Rust and I think we have enough of those types of languages already. Just look how well adopted D is. In the end it may be fatal trying to replace C++ because it is integral to so many systems nowadays.
Rust’s leadership is a mess per usual but the language itself is still going strong. Nothing too fancy has happened, but maybe the 2024 edition will be interesting. Zig on the other hand is improving rapidly and starting to get some more adoption. There is a JavaScript runtime written in Rust called Deno and now there is also Bun which is written in Zig. In my opinion Bun is way cooler and does some interesting things under the hood.
Still functioning
I’m not following the functional programming world all that closely, but OCaml just had a big release in December 2022. Maybe I should do a bigger project in OCaml and get a good feel of what the language is capable of. It seems fascinating enough theoretically, but I don’t see many real world use cases for myself in particular.
There are also some intriguing functional languages for the web, namely Reason, PureScript, Elm, and ReScript. I haven’t really used them extensively, but maybe I should see how they compare to the whole JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem. Functional programming is just one of those things that seems fun, but you never really use it for anything, it’s only adopted by other languages.
The best of the best
Now the most exciting part, a completely objective and unbiased pick for the best language ever. For a long time I have been thinking that C is the best language because of its simplicity, but as any veteran C programmer can attest there are some rough edges. Because of that I have been looking for, not a C++ replacement, but a C replacement. That’s a much harder role to fill because everything adheres to the C ABI.
In my journey trying to find a C alternative there have been a couple of interesting candidates that do things differently, namely Go and Zig. Now Go from the start has thrown the C ABI out of the window and does its own thing. Zig on the other hand can work with or without C, which is really cool. Zig also has a ton of little details that I appreciate while keeping the overall design simple and memorizable. Because of all that I declare Zig the ultimate champion of the programming world and the best language of 2023. We’ll see if 2024 has any interesting developments, but I feel like Zig will be my favorite for quite a while.