Programming Languages
Assembly
Symbolic machine code. One step above binary. Architecture-specific but teaches computers.
Zig
Andrew Kelley's C replacement. Compile-time metaprogramming. No hidden control flow.
Julia
MIT's scientific computing language. Python-like syntax with C-like speed. Multiple dispatch core.
R
Statistical language and environment. Academic and data science standard. Vectorized operations.
Scala
Martin Odersky's functional-OO hybrid. Powerful type system. Twitter and Spark.
OCaml
French functional language. Powerful type system and inference. Jane Street's trading language.
Prolog
Logic programming language. Facts and rules, let Prolog deduce. AI and expert systems.
Smalltalk
Alan Kay's pure object-oriented vision. Everything is object and message. Influenced all OOP languages.
COBOL
Grace Hopper's business language. Verbose English-like syntax. Powers banking systems still.
Fortran
First high-level language. Formula Translation for science. Still powers supercomputers.
Bash
Bourne Again Shell. Unix automation standard. Simple but full programming language.
Lua
Brazilian embeddable scripting. Simple and fast. Game and embedded systems choice.
Perl
Larry Wall's Swiss Army chainsaw. More than one way to do it. Regex and text processing king.
PHP
Rasmus' web scripting language. Powers WordPress and much of web. Pragmatic despite inelegance.
Ruby
Matz's joyful language. Rails made it famous. Optimizes for programmer happiness over performance.
TypeScript
Microsoft's typed JavaScript. Gradual typing and tooling. Became enterprise JavaScript standard.
Swift
Apple's modern language replacing Objective-C. Protocol-oriented and safe. iOS development standard.
Kotlin
JetBrains' Java improvement. Null-safety and concise syntax. Official Android language.
Go
Google's simple systems language. Goroutines and channels. Fast compilation and deployment.
Erlang
Ericsson's telecom language. Actor model and let it crash philosophy. Powers WhatsApp scale.
Elixir
José Valim's Ruby-like syntax on Erlang VM. Actor model concurrency. Phoenix framework challenges Rails.
Clojure
Rich Hickey's modern Lisp. Immutable data structures and JVM interop. Pragmatic functional programming.