Programming languages are, of course, what drives all computing, but cloud native computing has certain requirements that some languages are better than others at fulfilling. Hence, you won’t find very much coverage here of, say, Java, unless it is for some tools to retrofit enterprise Java applications into cloud native environments.
One language that has been great for this environment, for instance, is Go (which we will sometimes refer to as “Golang”). Created at Google, Go offers a friendly environment for system programming, especially in cloud infrastructure environments. Likewise, we will be following Rust (“Rustlang”), which offers both the speed of close-to-the-metal languages such as C++ but with the safety guarantees built-in that would prevent so many of the vulnerabilities that crop up in older languages.
We don’t cover browser development per se, we will keep tabs on Web Assembly (WASM), which could bring untold speed and scalability to the client side. Likewise, we are watching JavaScript and, especially, its many frameworks, libraries and associated projects that promise development scalability, such as TypeScript, which brings the full rigor of static typing to the browser language. And we are keeping a close eye on Python, given that it is quickly becoming the de facto language of choice for data scientists and practitioners of machine learning.
In addition to the languages themselves, we will also keep you up to date here on the latest and greatest development tools, including IDEs, scaffolding, and testing tools. For the development lifecycle, be sure to bookmark our microsite on CI/CD.
Oh, and don’t forget to check out the weekly wrap-up of all the latest development news that appears every Friday on the site, Mike Melanson’s “This Week in Programming.”
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