7 programming languages on the rise

From Ruby to Erlang, once niche programming language are gaining converts in today’s enterprise

1.Programming languages on the rise: Python
There seems to be two sorts of people who love Python: those who hate brackets, and scientists. The former helped create the language by building a version of Perl that is easier to read and not as chock-full of opening and closing brackets as a C descendant. Fast-forward several years, and the solution was good enough to be the first language available on Google's AppEngine -- a clear indication Python has the kind of structure that makes it easy to scale in the cloud, one of the biggest challenges for enterprise-grade computing.

2Programming languages on the rise: RubySome may argue that Ruby and Python are hardly "niche" languages, but the truth is, from an enterprise perspective, they remain promising tools all too often pushed to the margin. That said, Ruby, or more precisely the combination of Ruby with the Rails framework known as Ruby on Rails, is becoming increasingly popular for prototyping. Its entrance into the enterprise came on the heels of the Web 2.0 explosion, wherein many websites began as experiments in Ruby. 37signals -- one of Ruby's many proponents -- actually uses Ruby to deploy code.

3. Programming languages on the rise: MATLAB
Built for mathematicians to solve systems of linear equations, MATLAB has found rising interest in the enterprise, thanks to the large volumes of data today's organizations need to analyze. Many of the more sophisticated statistical techniques that match people with advertisements, songs, or Web pages depend upon the power of algorithms like those solved by MATLAB.

4.Programming languages on the rise:

JavaScriptavaScript is not an obscure language by any means. If anything, it may be the most compiled language on Earth, if only because every browser downloads the code and recompiles it every time someone loads a Web page.  Everywhere people need a small amount of scripting power, JavaScript finds new uses. One of the simplest ways for developers of large applications to offer users the ability to create subapplications, JavaScript continues to grow in the enterprise, one small chunk of code at a time.

5.Programming languages on the rise: R
Statistical analysis is being increasingly done in R these days, although some purists call the language S, its original name. Tibco sells a commercial version called S-Plus.

6. Programming languages on the rise: Erlang
Does your server need to respond to many different independent messages concurrently? Do you need to parcel these requests out to different cores or servers in various parts of the world? That's practically the definition of the hardest part of enterprise computing. Erlang, an open source language first created by scientists at Ericsson Computing Laboratory, excels at these tasks.

7. Programming languages on the rise: Cobol

It may not be fair to call Cobol a niche language as it was once the dominant language in the enterprise. Grace Murray Hopper, famous for finding the first bug in the early mainframes, helped create the language in 1959 and it's been enhanced hundreds of times since. Cobol jockeys today get to play with object-oriented extensions, self-modifying code, and practically every other gimmick.

That never earned it much respect in some circles. Or as famous academic Edsger Dijkstra put it: "The use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." The folks in mainframe shops everywhere ignored this note and soldiered on. IBM calls one of the latest releases "Enterprise Cobol 4.2," but it could as easily be numbered 147.2 or maybe even 588.3. Cobol programmers like the syntax that's more like a natural language with actual nouns and verbs that form clauses and sentences -- a technique that might call Ruby to mind.