Originally developed by a NASA engineer in the late ’80s, Perl excels at processing text, and developers like it because it’s powerful and flexible. It was once famously described as “the duct tape of the web,” because it’s really great at holding websites together, but it’s not the most elegant language.
Pascal: Named for famed philosopher Blaise Pascal, this language was instrumental in the coding of the original Apple Macintosh computers. Eventually, Pascal extended into so-called Object Pascal, where it’s still widely used in systems today.
Delphi Object Pascal: Originally developed at Apple in 1986 and named because it helped programmers connect to Oracle databases (as in, “The Oracle at Delphi”), Delphi is seeing its star rise once again as an alternative for building smartphone apps.
Swift: While Apple’s previous issues with Taylor Swift may have made all the headlines, the Apple Swift programming language was winning over developers as a faster, easier way to build iPhone apps. With high-profile fans like IBM, expect it to take off even more in 2016.
MATLAB: Intended as a mathematical programming language to help teach university students advanced algebra and image processing, it’s also widely used by scientists, engineers, and programmers working in the exploding field of image processing and other artificial-intelligence applications.
