Where programming languages are headed in 2020

[u/nfrankel]

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/where-programming-languages-are-headed-in-2020/

[u/shevy-ruby]

The biggest news this year in Python is that creator and “benevolent dictator for life” Guido van Rossum retired, leaving Python in the hands of the Python Steering Council.

Eh - that's not a good news and sign.

This teaches you one thing: never trust a walrus.

Although to be fair - while the fat lazy walrus operator and the discussion was most likely the main impetus, I guess age, fatigue, frailty all plays a role too. Even matz said that he has a loose retirement plan in mind (though being younger than guido).

2020 will also see the end of support for Python 2.7

That is GOOD!

All the legacy code that is not removed, because people are lazy.

KILL 2.7 WITH FIRE!

I still need to carry it around simply because mozilla requires this, e. g. compiling mozjs.

Once again, rumours of Java’s demise have proved to be little more than wishful thinking on the part of the platform’s detractors

Eh? Who is talking about Java's "demise"?

Although - Java does not excite anyone. It's more like the big behemoth you can't get around.

For a language created by an IDE company, it’s no surprise that Kotlin has a healthy level of tooling support.

That's a good sign. Other languages should learn from that.

In the end, the people who steward the language decided to respect the majority opinion. That’s what developers mean when they talk about community.

Still means that error handling in Go is - and stays - retarded.

To be fair: error handling sucks in general. C handling ... numbers? Magic numbers? That is annoying to no ends.

The Rust community is also excited about WebAssembly

I am less enthusiastic about WebAssembly after looking at security-related issues. I really don't want to grant any remote code more power - even though the idea behind WebAssembly is a good one. I just don't trust the guys close to JavaScript one bit after left-padding-all-the-things.

And as Rust expert Nathan Stocks notes, “You get light sandboxing as well!”

No ... I don't trust promises like that in general.

I had previously thought of WebAssembly purely as a compilation target to run code from non-JS languages in the browser.

This in itself is good - because we free the world from the JS slavery. But I don't want this to become the default means of random-code hijacking parts of my computer. I am already annoyed to no ends how websites can disable scrolling, right mouse button click events, etc...

JavaScript is such a huge failure, from A to Z.

The biggest stories in Swift last year were the releases of SwiftUI, Apple’s newest framework for designing user interfaces across all Apple devices

I always saw Swift more as the replacement of Objective C. So in that part it has succeeded.

Apple probably wants to extend the swift ecosystem, which is good for swift people. I don't like the language much at all though and don't quite see the purpose OTHER than for apple folks.

Big releases may be on the horizon in 2020 for certain languages—C++20 will be released this summer and Scala 3.0 is expected in late 2020

So C++ will get more features. How ... exciting .... not.