I think (outside hobbies) new programming language development is basically dead at this point. The major use cases have been filled, and there are more forces than ever towards using a battle-tested language with a massive ecosystem. Further, less and less code is being written or read by humans so the actual language ergonomics matter less than ever to those who would fund new language creation.
For gamedev scripting, the gap has not been filled yet. Lua is good for embedding but the language itself is terrible for LLM usage (too much dynamic typing). C# is too heavy for scripting usage (long compile times, clunky to embed into a C++ engine), and other alternatives (AngelScript, daScript, ...) are just too niche.
The major use cases have not been filled, only the major corporate use cases. That doesn't mean there aren't still major gaps to be filled now, or that the current use cases won't evolve in the future.
So it may be true that "programming language" development is done, but there are many more uses for formal languages than just writing apps and website and such.
Moreover, it may be true that less code as a proportion of all code is being written or read by humans. But more humans today are reading and writing code than ever before. The ability to express unambiguous ideas to agents using formal langauges is more important than ever, even if people are only reading/writing a small proportion of all code.
Similarly, it's not true that because agents will be reading / writing code that language ergonomics do not matter. Agents have resource restrictions like token budgets, and they are also trained using human knowledge and conventions. Ergonomics apply to agents just as they do humans; languages which are verbose require more tokens to write, languages that can be verified are more useful in agentic loops, languages with live compiler introspection and interpreters can give fast results to agents etc... we see how important programming languages are for agents in their thinking process.
So I hold exactly the opposite view: it's not clear to me why languages built 30 years ago in a world where the Internet barely existed would be accidentally ideal for AI agents in 2026 to think in such that we can say the whole field is solved (and no, I don't think the amount of training data on those languages seals the fate because that status is ephemeral and also it's not clear the training on one language corpus isn't transferrable to other languages).
Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased use of its original name Weiqi or its Korean name Baduk.
The Japanese name is actually 囲碁 (igo). 碁 (go) is just an abbreviation; I don't see it often in Japanese text, but for some reason the Anglosphere decided to adopt it.
囲 is a simplification of 圍, and 碁 is a Japanese-specific letter that roughly maps to 棋. If you read 圍棋 in Chinese, you get weiqi.
Devs will never learn this because naming languages after common words is exactly the PL dev culture. It's not important to pldevs because they know the median number of users for a pl is 0, large companies know they can buy the search results, so names are chosen for reasons other than SEO.
People get around it by appending "-lang" or "-script" to the name and that solves the SEO.
In the 90s/2000s people also used to shorten cybersex to cyber. I guess if they wanted to have fun with it they could add a "Wanna Cyber?" in place of the usual "Try <x>".
I even had someone submit a resume that listed crypto as one of their skills. When I asked basic questions it quickly became clear they were talking about cryptocurrencies lol
My gripe with new languages like this is that strings are always UTF-8 and that makes it needlessly difficult to parse HTTP headers correctly. This has led to vulnerabilities in the past.
I disagree. UTF-8 is the right default. Pure ASCII strings are rarely needed in modern software. Unless you know that you need ASCII, your strings should support unicode.
I agree. At this point scripting languages should have native support for string subtypes with custom charsets (ascii/utf16) or just regexp-defined or even ENUM()'erated values.
IIRC historically on Windows, a string was UTF16, on unix it was ASCII; nowadays everywhere it's UTF8 without a way to specifically limit what goes into a string.
For example UTF8 opens the door to homoglyph attacks and various other things (RTL, spaces), and a program should be able to force a string to be ASCII-only so that these classes of problems are ruled out.
Homoglyph attacks and RTL work just as well in UTF-16. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are different character encodings for the same character set (Unicode).
That being said, Windows permits unpaired surrogates in its "UTF-16" strings, even though that is not actually valid UTF-16. Similarly, many Linux APIs accept arbitrary bytes, not just valid UTF-8.
Of course. I was trying to say that it would be nice to limit certain variables to an ASCII charset, or ASCII+umlaut+accents without any of the 10k other UTF8 shenanigans.
Interesting concept I guess. But the website reads like poorly AI generated code. No information as to what the grey and orange bars mean, overlapping text and such.
It links to the bench.cy, but nothing explains how the others were measured. It seems that they're including some start-up time in some that dominates, but not explaining whether it's realistic to be needing to spend that.
I think (outside hobbies) new programming language development is basically dead at this point. The major use cases have been filled, and there are more forces than ever towards using a battle-tested language with a massive ecosystem. Further, less and less code is being written or read by humans so the actual language ergonomics matter less than ever to those who would fund new language creation.
For gamedev scripting, the gap has not been filled yet. Lua is good for embedding but the language itself is terrible for LLM usage (too much dynamic typing). C# is too heavy for scripting usage (long compile times, clunky to embed into a C++ engine), and other alternatives (AngelScript, daScript, ...) are just too niche.
The major use cases have not been filled, only the major corporate use cases. That doesn't mean there aren't still major gaps to be filled now, or that the current use cases won't evolve in the future.
This talk argues there are many other purposes for programming languages other than the use cases of big tech: https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-...
So it may be true that "programming language" development is done, but there are many more uses for formal languages than just writing apps and website and such.
Moreover, it may be true that less code as a proportion of all code is being written or read by humans. But more humans today are reading and writing code than ever before. The ability to express unambiguous ideas to agents using formal langauges is more important than ever, even if people are only reading/writing a small proportion of all code.
Similarly, it's not true that because agents will be reading / writing code that language ergonomics do not matter. Agents have resource restrictions like token budgets, and they are also trained using human knowledge and conventions. Ergonomics apply to agents just as they do humans; languages which are verbose require more tokens to write, languages that can be verified are more useful in agentic loops, languages with live compiler introspection and interpreters can give fast results to agents etc... we see how important programming languages are for agents in their thinking process.
So I hold exactly the opposite view: it's not clear to me why languages built 30 years ago in a world where the Internet barely existed would be accidentally ideal for AI agents in 2026 to think in such that we can say the whole field is solved (and no, I don't think the amount of training data on those languages seals the fate because that status is ephemeral and also it's not clear the training on one language corpus isn't transferrable to other languages).
This is by far the most stupid name for a new language imaginable. Shortening it to "cyber" on the landing page too..
When will devs learn that being able to search for a term on the open internet without having it polluted by normal language is kind of important
Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased use of its original name Weiqi or its Korean name Baduk.
Google's search surely degraded a lot, but if I search for "go board game" - I get 0 results for the programming language.
The Japanese name is actually 囲碁 (igo). 碁 (go) is just an abbreviation; I don't see it often in Japanese text, but for some reason the Anglosphere decided to adopt it.
囲 is a simplification of 圍, and 碁 is a Japanese-specific letter that roughly maps to 棋. If you read 圍棋 in Chinese, you get weiqi.
Devs will never learn this because naming languages after common words is exactly the PL dev culture. It's not important to pldevs because they know the median number of users for a pl is 0, large companies know they can buy the search results, so names are chosen for reasons other than SEO.
People get around it by appending "-lang" or "-script" to the name and that solves the SEO.
In the 90s/2000s people also used to shorten cybersex to cyber. I guess if they wanted to have fun with it they could add a "Wanna Cyber?" in place of the usual "Try <x>".
It drove me nuts in the cryptocurrency boom that people shortened cryptocurrency to "crypto". As in, "I'm into crypto" or "I work in crypto".
Cryptography is much older than bitcoin.
I even had someone submit a resume that listed crypto as one of their skills. When I asked basic questions it quickly became clear they were talking about cryptocurrencies lol
2022-2023 on the bottom of the main page, last release from 2023 & most recent commit from 8 months ago... seems almost dead to me
My gripe with new languages like this is that strings are always UTF-8 and that makes it needlessly difficult to parse HTTP headers correctly. This has led to vulnerabilities in the past.
I disagree. UTF-8 is the right default. Pure ASCII strings are rarely needed in modern software. Unless you know that you need ASCII, your strings should support unicode.
I agree. At this point scripting languages should have native support for string subtypes with custom charsets (ascii/utf16) or just regexp-defined or even ENUM()'erated values.
IIRC historically on Windows, a string was UTF16, on unix it was ASCII; nowadays everywhere it's UTF8 without a way to specifically limit what goes into a string.
For example UTF8 opens the door to homoglyph attacks and various other things (RTL, spaces), and a program should be able to force a string to be ASCII-only so that these classes of problems are ruled out.
Homoglyph attacks and RTL work just as well in UTF-16. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are different character encodings for the same character set (Unicode).
That being said, Windows permits unpaired surrogates in its "UTF-16" strings, even though that is not actually valid UTF-16. Similarly, many Linux APIs accept arbitrary bytes, not just valid UTF-8.
Of course. I was trying to say that it would be nice to limit certain variables to an ASCII charset, or ASCII+umlaut+accents without any of the 10k other UTF8 shenanigans.
The NT kernel predates UTF8 by at least 3 years. It originally used UCS2, which covers the basic multilingual plane of the first unicode standard.
Interesting concept I guess. But the website reads like poorly AI generated code. No information as to what the grey and orange bars mean, overlapping text and such.
"Showing script time (orange), load time (gray), and peak memory usage."
The benchmarking seems a little bit suspect.
It links to the bench.cy, but nothing explains how the others were measured. It seems that they're including some start-up time in some that dominates, but not explaining whether it's realistic to be needing to spend that.
It would be nice if the examples included an integration with an existing game engine. Game scripting is a very common use case for those languages.
Seems to be in the same category as Lua. Can a PL nerd explain what's different about it?
Lua has users. Network effects are important. (I have a PhD in programming languages.)
This. Despite my personal dislike of Python I would never discourage anyone from using it. It has an extraordinary ecosystem.
Great you came up with a compiler and some syntax.
What libraries exist.
What's package management system.
How does it interop with existing code?
Is there a JSON parser, an XML parser? Crypto algorithms? Database drivers?
People who invent languages from scratch inherit the technical debt of recreating the entire software ecosystem.
It looks like they are just pulling from the internet at the top of source files:
`use rl 'https://mycdn.com/raylib'`
Good luck with securing that. At least JavaScript has the sense to put it all in a single config file.