Creators of two dozen new programming languages — some designed to enable powerful new Web applications and mobile devices — presented their work last week in Portland, Oregon, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

The designers gathered for the first Emerging Languages Camp.

"There's a renaissance in language design at the moment," said Rob Pike, an engineer at Google and codesigner of Go, a programming language being developed at the company. "And the biggest reason for it is that the existing mainstream languages just aren't solving the problems people want solved." In 20-minute presentations, designers shared details of their embryonic languages. What all the designers had in common was a desire to shed decades-old programming conventions that seem increasingly ill-suited to modern computing.

For the complete story, see New Languages, and Why We Need Them.