The debate over programming languages is nothing new, and while recent discussions have centered around the impact of AI and whether generative AI will completely eliminate the need for proficiency in programming languages, continuous learning of programming languages remains an integral part of the process.
Swift
Ted Kremenek, director of languages and runtimes at Apple, has said that programmers should look to Swift instead of the traditional stalwart C++. “Swift’s safety, speed, and ease of use, combined with built-in C and C++ interoperability, mean that Swift is the best choice to succeed C++.”
Swift was launched by Apple in 2014. The latest iteration, Swift 6, is scheduled to be released later this year and will feature a number of improvements, including safer and simpler programming, and new coding-time data security features that can diagnose concurrent memory access in developer projects while coding. This optimization can find and fix errors with minimal changes to the entire code base, enhancing the security and maintainability of future code.
The company also noted that Swift 6 will be 8.4 times faster than Python.
Finch
Finch is a new programming language designed by a research team at MIT to support flexible control flow and diverse data structures. It provides programmers with a completely new way of programming for structured array programming.
Its creators say: “Finch provides a programming model that addresses the challenges of computing on structured arrays by combining control flow and data structure into a common representation that can be jointly optimized.”
Sources agree that “one of Finch’s major innovations is its support for a rich structured array programming language… Finch raises the productivity level to that of dense arrays. It enables programmers to work with complex data structures without sacrificing expressiveness or efficiency.”
Although Finch is still in its infancy, VentureBeat believes that its technical advantages in areas such as control flow integration mean that the language can be used for database management, image and signal processing, implementation of machine learning and data science, or creating graph algorithms.
In addition, Finch provides more complex array structures than before. “We are the first to extend the hierarchical description to capture banded, triangular, run-length-encoded, or sparse datasets and any combination thereof,” the authors said.
Zig
Zig is a good option for programmers who want to master a programming language as soon as possible to improve their income ability. According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, Zig has become one of the most suitable high-paying programming languages for developers to master in 2024, and the average annual salary of Zig developers is $103,000.
Andrew Kelley, lead developer and president of the Zig Software Foundation, outlines Zig as “a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining powerful, optimized, and reusable software.”
“The problem with the preprocessor is that it turns one language into two languages that don’t know each other. Despite its flaws, C programmers use the preprocessor because it provides necessary features such as conditional compilation, constants for array sizes, and generics. Zig plans to provide a better alternative that solves these problems,”
Zig is very suitable for those who value speed and size, and the language is also known as the successor of C language.
