Some days ago, I was cleaning my Code folder from old snippets and test projects when I found an old Clojure package I did to test some Clojure feature. I remember that I kept the project sleeping in my Code folder because I thought that it would come in handy when Clojure 1.9 would be released. However, I left that project stub back in February 2016, more than a year ago. That raise the question: where is Clojure 1.9?

Another year, another 5 promising programming languages you should keep an eye on in 2017. As usual, I’d like to write the warning I put here every year: in this list, you will not find programming languages for hiring purposes, but for very long-time investments and for pure programming fetish.

So, now that you know what I am talking about, here we go with the top 5 for 2017.

Top 5 Promising Programming Languages for 2017

Rust

Elixir and Clojure are two uprising and fun functional languages. As you know, I talked about both of them in the article on the most promising languages of 2016, and, in fact, they are the only real functional languages I mentioned in there.

At the time, I didn’t really explore these two languages in deep, and in fact, I think I was a bit too hard on Clojure. During this half year, I had the opportunity to go deeper in Clojure and my opinion on the languages increased accordingly. Moreover, Clojure 1.8 came out just a month later with some nice improvements and the upcoming Clojure 1.9 (with the introduction of the `clojure.spec`) seems to push the bar even further. So, yeah, I was wrong on a big point: Clojure is advancing quite fast.

It is time to update one othe most popular article in this blog. It is time to talk about the most promising languages of 2016! But first, let me repeat the small notice I did the last year. The languages I am listing below are not the most used languages, or the languages that you have to learn in order to find a great job as a developer. There are many more established languages that fill this role. Languages such as C++, Java, C#, Python and JavaScript are way more solid and safe if you are looking for a job or to start a developer career.

Instead, I am trying to list emerging languages that may become more important at the end of 2016. This list is for you if: 1) you are passionate about programming languages 2) you want to learn something new because you are bored with your current language 3) you want to bet on a language hoping that it will become mainstream (and thus, you will be one of the early experts in that language, and this implies nice job opportunity). Or you can read this list because you are simply interested on where the language research and development is going in the real world (academic research is a totally different story).