Staying current in the programming field can sometimes make you feel like the first cloud to rain.
You’re a master at Ruby on Rails or any other language? Great, but how are you with statistical analysis in R? Want to work at Google? Forget Python and start building channels in Go.
1. Introduction to R
It may be surprising to hear that R has been used since around 1994. It was built at the University of Auckland by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman and was based on the Bell Labs language S. The turning point for this statistical analysis tool came when it in the 2014 Dice Tech Salary Survey, it came up to first place as the highest paying tech skill. That can be considered the year that Big Data arrived in mainstream business and R was clearly the best way to handle it.
Originally it was preferred by academic data scientists though, R has proven instrumental for enormous business applications like large-scale financial reporting for Bank of America and Facebook’s Social Graph, which analyzes interactions among 500 million people. Today, companies like Microsoft are using R as a server platform to go further with predictive modeling and machine learning. For many of these companies, R is becoming extremely resource-intensive for advanced analytics and is replacing SQL.
Here are three reasons why R has taken off recently:
1. Because R supports missing values as a core data value, it can easily deal with incomplete data sources that are more common in real world projects.
2. A popular data visualization package for R called ggplot2 breaks up the graphics into scales and layers as components. It’s now the most used R extension package.
3. It has a customizable top-level language shell, and coders have used that feature to build integrated development environments such as RStudio, which made R much easier to learn and more widely available for business use cases.
In the Redmonk Programming Language Rankings of 2016, which compares the popularity of code on GitHub vs. Stack Overflow, R ranked 13th.
2. Introduction to Go
While some of the other languages here are getting a new life, Go (a.k.a. golang) is experiencing its first one. In 2012, Google presented the open source Go v. 1.0, after giving the world a glimpse of the experimental language three years earlier. Google had its eye on the future, saying, “People who write Go 1 programs can be confident that those programs will continue to compile and run without change, in many environments, on a timescale of years. In the same way, authors who write books about Go 1.0 can be sure that their examples and explanations will be helpful to readers today and into the future.”
Go was made for web services that need to handle thousands of concurrent web requests. The other prominent app builders like Python can’t deal with the speed and intensity of parallel requests on mobile. For the same reason, it is an excellent HTTP handler. Like C++, Go is ideal for writing web services with precise control without the sharp learning curve of the aging object-oriented standby. Go has also been compared favorably with Algol.
As backing of Google is expected from a language, Go has been used for major projects like Docker’s large-scale, distributed software projects. The range’s proof of Go came in the form of highly productive Revel, which is a full-stack web framework, built with Go. Revel has capability to handle web essentials like caching, parameter parsing, routing, templating and more.
Go’s power of handling concurrent requests resides in its goroutines and channels. While goroutines function like threads, channels are the communication ports between goroutines.
As per the Redmonk Programming Language Rankings of 2016, Go currently ranks as the 15th most popular language.
3. Introduction to Hack
Hack was released as open source in 2014, but it was an internal Facebook project. Hack is a way of combining the short dev cycles of dynamically-typed language with the core discipline of static-typed ones, as a replacement of their PHP. It also borrows features from some of the other new languages, such as type annotation and generics that allow you to set parameters for classes and methods, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.
Facebook noted that it was becoming problematic handle many common tasks in PHP, such as calling a method accidentally on a null object, which would generate an error that you wouldn’t be able to catch until runtime. Another problem entitled with complex APIs that needed developers to look up mundane method names in documentation. Those are just annoying unless you are working at a company like Facebook, where developers are expected to ship code twice a day. Thanks to the upgrade, Hack is now replacing Facebook’s entire PHP codebase.
While just about any site that uses PHP now could be using Hack, it has not gained widespread acceptance yet. One example of a creative uses for Hack is Vindinium, which is the basis of an AI-driven game system.
4. Introduction to Rust
Mozilla’s Rust has been in development for years, but Rust 1.0, the first stable release, appeared in 2015. Mozilla’s David Herman detailed what makes Rust valuable: “Rust has something unique to offer that languages in that space have never had before, and that is a degree of safety that languages like C and C++ have never had. … [T]here are some things that make doing systems programming terrifying that are gone in Rust.” Specifically, he’s talking about security vulnerabilities in C++.
Rust was made to give programmers complete control through extensive compile-time checking. For example, browser exploits in C++, which caused Firefox to be unstable, would generate compile-time bugs in Rust and close the hole.
The 2016 State of Rust Survey reported that one-fifth of the language’s users are deploying it for commercial purposes, either full or part-time.
Rust won first place for Most Loved Programming Language of 2016 in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
5. Introduction to Swift
Apple has many new hardware platforms, like the Apple Watch and Apple TV. Swift was built for them. Initially, it was brought out in 2014 as a better alternative for Objective-C, since it makes it easier to build native apps for iOS. It’s also made for building apps on OSX, watchOS, tvOS and Linux.
At the end of last year it became open source. Many coders with a great deal of JavaScript experience say Swift is easier than Ruby or Python for developing apps. Lyft rewrote their iOS app in Swift, not due to any problems with the existing app, but because Swift made it easy to improve the base code they wrote in a hurry before launch.
Many of the biggest app developers on iOS have already incorporated Swift into ecosystems, including:
· Airbnb
· CNN
· Eventbrite
· Imgur
· KAYAK
· LinkedIn
· Medium
· Pandora
· Tumblr
· The Weather Channel
Swift has moved up to 17th place in the Redmonk Programming Language Rankings of 2016.
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