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Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)


I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at programming, sometimes even at thinking.

It’s used to develop programming languages (including the original Rust prototypes), static analysis tools for nuclear plants, operating systems for satellites and other situations that require an extremely high level of safety. In fact I am a bit sad whenever I see microservices or Kafka, as they are largely reimplementations of the design of Erlang/Elixir and the underlying BEAM Virtual Machine, but based on technologies that are much harder to use and deploy and protocols that are several orders of magnitude slower. This includes Haskell, Scheme, SmallTalk, (Tw)elf, Idris, Python, Go, PHP, Perl, Bash, C, C++, JoCaml, JavaScript, TypeScript, Scala, C#, F#, Visual Basic, Ruby, (D)TAL, Squeak, Logo, Scratch, UnrealScript, GDScript, Lua, SQL…

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