5 ‘Unknown’ Programming Languages That Will Surprise You

By Atharva Gangji

1. Erlang

Erlang is a general-purpose, functional language originally created by Ericsson and released as open source in 1998. As you may have guessed it was designed to improve phone communications, but nowadays it’s main application is to build massively soft real-time systems.


2. Julia

Julia is a high-level dynamic language specifically designed for numerical and scientific computing (although it is technically a general-purpose language). It’s widely used in cloud computing and has won praise for being modern, easy to use and very high-performance.


3. Scala

Scala prides itself on combining object-oriented and functional programming elements. Part of its design was inspired by solving the shortcomings of Java, and its source code is intended to be compiled to Java.


4. D

D was originally created to be a successor to C, hence the catchy name. D, also known as Dlang, is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001.


5. Haskell

Haskell is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation.