JavaScript and JQuery Aplications Languages

While JavaScript first appeared in 1995, it is only in the past couple of years that libraries such as Prototype and JQuery have helped the language become more accessible to a wider developer audience. As developers continue to embrace JavaScript for developing rich user web applications, we increasingly hold JavaScript in the same level of esteem as any other production language, ensuring that scripts are adequately tested, refactored and maintained.

A significant amount of innovation occurred in the JavaScript space thanks to the Ruby on Rails community. This same community has helped to move both internal and external DSLs forward as a means for more closely mapping business requirements in code. Ruby’s syntax lends itself easily to the creation of easily readable DSLs, while language tools such as ANTLR help to make the creation of new domain specific languages more accessible to interested developers.

When C# first appeared, many saw it as a direct competitor to the Java language’s dominance in enterprise application development. This was often attributed to the syntactical similarities that the two languages shared. Since its introduction, however, C# has continued to move forward with the adoption of language features such as lambda expressions, extension methods, object initializers and automatic property setters and getters, all of which are available in the 3.5 release of the language. With the 4.0 release of C#, we will see the introduction of a dynamic keyword and named and optional parameters, which will continue to bring
C# more in line with languages such as Ruby and well ahead of the Java language.

As C# continues to surge ahead, the Java language appears to be moving slowly as the Java community waits for Java 7. Having waited for new language features to surface for almost 3 years, the Java community has begun to innovate in new languages that run on the Java Virtual Machine, languages such as Groovy, JRuby, Scala and Clojure. With the increase in number of languages available on the JVM, we expect enterprises to begin to assess the suitability of reducing the amount of Java specific code developed in their enterprise applications in favor of these newer languages.

The remaining two language types included on the radar are often grouped together. While functional and concurrent languages may be adopted in similar environments, their approaches are different. Functional programming focuses on expressing code in the form of mathematical functions that avoid maintaining state across multiple invocations. While functional languages such as Haskell have been around for a number of years, new functional (themed) languages such as Scala, F# and Clojure have sparked some interest in this paradigm. Due to the way in which functional languages manage state, interest in these languages has increased by many developers seeking to make the most out of multi-core processors.

Many concurrent languages are also functional languages. The distinction lies in the emphasis on running operations in parallel. A number of such languages exist; Erlang is currently the most popular of these languages. Concurrent languages commonly provide some means for handling concurrency by using messages to communicate across multiple threads.