"Picat is a newish language that has just reached a version 1.0 release. It has some interesting features, but the fact that it supports logic programming is the most important"
Back then it was just reaching version 1 and a few days ago it reached version 2 beta. What is even more good news is that its creators have just been awarded a $10,000 prize from the NYC Media Lab. As the university newspaper reports:
A team of two students and one professor from Brooklyn College won the grand prize of $10,000 at the NYC Media Lab (NYCML) Summit.
Computer Science Professor Neng-Fa Zhou, first-year graduate student Jie Mei, and programmer Jonathan Fruhman brought home the prize for their demo of a programming language called Picat
“After the demo I left the conference—my student stayed there and he told me the news and I couldn’t believe it,” recalled Zhou. “I didn’t even know they gave out prizes.”
Let's hope that the prize gives them some extra resources to push the language further.
And for the second language you have never heard of what about Nim which has just been released as a version 0.15.2, a bugfix version following hot on the heels of Version 0.15.0.
"Nim (formerly known as "Nimrod") is a statically typed, imperative programming language that tries to give the programmer ultimate power without compromises on runtime efficiency. This means it focuses on compile-time mechanisms in all their various forms.
Beneath a nice infix/indentation based syntax with a powerful (AST based, hygienic) macro system lies a semantic model that supports a soft realtime GC on thread local heaps. Asynchronous message passing is used between threads, so no "stop the world" mechanism is necessary. An unsafe shared memory heap is also provided for the increased efficiency that results from that model."
The final language you have never heard of isn't so much a general purpose language but a pattern language.
"Rosie is a supercharged alternative to Regular Expressions (regex), matching patterns against any input text. Rosie ships with hundreds of sample patterns for timestamps, network addresses, email addresses, CSV files, and many more.
Unlike most regex tools, Rosie can generate structured (JSON) output. And, Rosie has an interactive pattern development mode to help write and debug patterns."
Rosie or Rosie Pattern Langauge (RPL) has just reached version 0.99f which is the candidate for release. Rosie is available as a C library that is callable from other languages.
"RPL is based on Parsing Expression Grammars, which can express recursive structures (like XML and JSON) that regular expressions cannot. And Parsing Expression Grammars can run in linear time in the size of the input data, making them a good choice for processing big data.
The Rosie Pattern Engine is an implementation of an RPL compiler and an RPL runtime environment. Both components are written in the Lua language and use the LPEG package. The engine is a shared object file that can be linked with another application, and there is also a command line interface. It uses RPL patterns to extract information from input data and outputs structured JSON"
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