Code Wars

SAP's own language, used to customize SAP systems. You mostly meet it because your employer runs SAP, not because you chose it.

Built for systems where failure is not an option — aviation, rail, defense contracts. Strict on purpose and hard to be casual in.

Salesforce's language, running inside Salesforce with hard limits on how much work one request may do.

One line per machine instruction, specific to the processor it targets. Nothing is done for you, including arithmetic on addresses.

Made so that non-specialists could program. Home computers booted straight into it, so a generation met code by typing line numbers.

Small, close to the hardware, and underneath almost everything else. Operating systems and other languages are written in it.

Microsoft's answer to Java, now cross-platform and the language behind Unity, which is why so many games speak it.

A Lisp on the Java virtual machine: data structures that cannot be changed, and code written as the same lists it manipulates.

A tidier syntax that compiled down to JavaScript. Many of the ideas it pushed ended up inside JavaScript itself.

The large, industrial Lisp: macros that rewrite the language, and an object system most languages still do not match.

C with objects, templates and generics layered on over decades. Fast, and large enough that no one knows all of it.

Ruby's syntax with static types and a compiler, so it looks scripted and runs native.

Describes how a page looks. The cascade means several rules can apply at once, and which one wins has its own arithmetic.

An attempt at C++ without the accumulated weight, with garbage collection you are allowed to switch off.

Google's language for Flutter, which draws its own widgets so an app looks identical on Android and iPhone.

Pascal with a visual designer for Windows software. Plenty of business applications still run on it and quietly get maintained.

Functional, and built on the Erlang machine, so it inherits the trick of running thousands of tiny processes that fail without taking the rest down.

A front-end language with no runtime exceptions by construction. The trade is that you do everything its way.

Built for telephone switches that cannot go down. Processes are cheap, isolated, and expected to crash and be restarted.

A functional language on the .NET runtime, where values do not change unless you ask for it.

Built for numbers and still used for them: weather models and physics simulations lean on it because the math libraries are decades deep.

A looser, scripted companion to Java. Most people meet it without choosing it, through Gradle build files and Jenkins pipelines.

Purely functional and lazy: nothing is computed until something asks for it, and a function cannot quietly change the world.

Not a programming language and never claimed to be: it marks up structure. Saying so out loud starts the argument this site exists for.

Aimed at scientific computing that is quick to write and quick to run, so you stop prototyping in one language and rewriting in another.

Runs on the Java virtual machine and is the default for Android. Designed so that a variable cannot be null unless you say so.

Small enough to embed anywhere, which is why it ended up scripting games, mod systems and network gear.

Built around matrices, with a paid license and a toolbox for every field. Universities and engineering teams run on it.

Compiles to C and reads like Python, aiming for scripting comfort with compiled speed.

C with Smalltalk-style messaging, and how Mac and iPhone apps were written before Swift. The square brackets are the giveaway.

Functional with a type checker strict enough that compiling is most of the debugging. Compilers and finance are its home turf.

Designed to teach structured programming, then used to ship real software. Turbo Pascal put a compiler on home computers.

Built for text and reports, and glue for a generation of system administration. Its regular expressions became everyone else's.

Windows scripting that passes objects between commands instead of plain text, so output keeps its structure.

Made by statisticians for statistics. Indexing starts at one instead of zero, which trips up everyone arriving from another language.

A Lisp for building other languages: you can define a new one and run it in the same file.

Optimized for how it reads rather than how it runs. Rails made it the shortcut for getting a web app in front of people.

Mixes object-oriented and functional styles on the Java virtual machine. Powerful, and famous for code that only its author can read.

A deliberately tiny Lisp used to teach how languages themselves work. Almost everything is a list, including the code.

You snap colored blocks together and they cannot fit in a way that breaks. It is how a lot of people meet programming at school.

Glue for the command line: pipe one program into the next. Quoting is where the bodies are buried.

Written for smart contracts on Ethereum. Once deployed the code cannot be edited, which makes every bug permanent.

Apple's language for iPhone and Mac apps, built to replace Objective-C while still being able to call it.

Describes hardware, not software. What you write becomes wires and gates on a chip, and everything happens at once.

The other hardware description language, wordier than Verilog and common in aerospace and defense work.

Aims at C's job with no hidden control flow and no hidden memory allocation. If something costs you, it is written down.

You state facts and rules, and it searches for answers. There is no loop to write, which is either liberating or maddening.