Huawei did not specify why it chose the name Cangjie for its programming language. However, the company said that it should become a link between the operating systems Huawei HarmonyOS and OpenEuler. The language should allow to write universal code suitable for both platforms. This was revealed by Deng Taihua, president of Huawei’s computing division, who said that the programming language will launch next year, but did not say when exactly.

Open Euler is Huawei’s lesser-known operating system for cloud computing. It debuted in January 2020 and is a proprietary Linux distribution that is based on the commercial EulerOS, which originated from CentOS. OpenEuler is optimized to work with Arm processors. HarmonyOS, on the other hand, is a consumer operating system that runs on smartphones and a huge amount of other smart electronics.

It is worth noting that Huawei is not alone in its desire to introduce its own programming language. Google has Go, which turned out to be very appealing to hackers, and Apple introduced Swift back in 2014, although Objective-C is still the core language for macOS and iOS.

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Among the exotic programming languages for writing malware are Go (Golang), D (DLang), Nim and Rust. As a rule, these languages are used to create malicious software aimed at large organizations and which exploits weaknesses in the protection of the corporate infrastructure. We are talking about malware that implements multi-stage, carefully planned and organized cyber-attacks.

Once on the victim’s computer, these software modules bypass traditional defenses to later download, decode and launch remote access Trojans, most often Remcos and NanoCore, as well as Cobalt Strike beacons.

In some cases, when the cybercriminals have sufficient resources, non-standard languages for these purposes are used not only for the modules performing the initial attack, but also for the whole malware package. The Go language is of particular interest to attackers. It is used by hackers on an almost regular basis for all major platforms.

According to the authors of the study, new or unusual programming languages make it difficult to decompile malware, circumvent defenses that use signature-based detection tools with relative ease, and simplify cross-platform compatibility of attacks. The code base of such malware itself is an additional level of disguise. Their developers, in fact, do not have to make any additional effort; the effectiveness of the attack is increased simply by the fact that one of these programming languages is used.

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Java was founded in 1991. That was when a group of developers from Sun Microsystems (later absorbed by Oracle Corporation), headed by James Gosling, began creating the Oak language for use in digital consumer devices. A year later, the project presented its first prototype to demonstrate the capabilities of the new platform-independent programming language, with internet technology playing a key role in its later development.

In 1995, the Oak language was renamed Java and gained wide popularity thanks to the inclusion of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in the Netscape browser. From that moment on the popularity of Java, which could work identically on different hardware platforms regardless of the machine architecture used in them, began to grow rapidly, and the language itself found application in almost all spheres of the IT-industry. Java works in NASA’s Mars rovers and the Large Hadron Collider. And in everyday life, we are surrounded by computers, mobile devices, media players, and even smart cards that also run on Java.

A quarter of a century later, Java continues to be in demand in a professional environment as a tool for creating applications and still holds firmly to its position as one of the most popular programming languages.

“It is useful to assess what we have achieved in 25 years, but we are moving forward and aim to develop Java innovations in the future as well. And millions of Java developers will continue to create applications that shape the world around us, from entertainment to nuclear physics to social networking to finding life on Mars,” Oracle said in a statement. – A quarter-century later, we’re seeing tremendous positive changes in our lives thanks to Java. And we expect the next 25 years – and beyond – to be just as bright and fulfilling. Our world is becoming a better place because of Java.”

To celebrate the anniversary, Oracle has developed a special website at oracle.com/java/moved-by-java that tells the story, present and future of Java.

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In May’s report, reflecting the changes in the professional community’s interest in software development environments, the C programming language once again took over from Java, which had held the top spot for quite a long time and moved to second place on the list. The third place is firmly held by Python.

As for the other programming languages on the list, R, Swift, Go, PL/SQL and Scratch showed good growth dynamics and a surge of interest from the interested audience during the year. Assembler, Perl, and Objective-C were mentioned less frequently on the Internet.

It is important to note that the index generated by the company does not say which development environment is better or worse or in which language more lines of code are written. It only takes into account statistical information about the number of mentions of a particular programming language in search engines, social networks, popular discussion sites, sites of recruiting agencies, and other specialized resources that are in demand among developers.

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JavaScript continues to be the most popular programming language among developers. This is not surprising since the JavaScript ecosystem is huge. Additionally, Python and Kotlin are among the top three fastest-growing programming languages for mobile app developers. That said, Java continues to lead the way in mobile app development.

Kotlin is proving its worth when it comes to Android application development and is increasingly becoming a replacement for Java. The report notes that over the past two years, developers have started using Kotlin twice as often. According to available data, JavaScript is leading among web developers, Python is actively used in a wide range of areas, including in the field of machine learning, and Go and Ruby are used to develop software solutions for cloud systems.

The paramount importance of open source software is noted. A survey conducted by Slashdata showed that developers have a positive attitude to open source software and take part in its development. The report says that 60% of the survey participants reported that they participate in open source software development. At the same time, 29% of developers participate in such projects to improve their own coding skills, 22% of programmers contribute because they simply like it, and only 3% of specialists work for money.

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System programming is the development and management of software that serves as a platform for creating application applications, ensuring that they interact with the processor, main memory, input/output devices, and network equipment. The system software creates a special abstraction in the form of interfaces, which help to create application software without going into details of how the “iron” works directly.

Triplett himself defines system programming as “anything that is not an application. It includes things like BIOS, firmware, loaders and operating system kernels, various kinds of embedded low-level code, and virtual machine implementations. Interestingly, Triplett believes that the Web browser is also system software, because the browser has long been more than “just a program,” evolving into a stand-alone “platform for Web sites and Web applications.

In the past, most system software, including BIOS, loaders, and firmware, was written in assembly language. In the 1960s, experiments began to provide hardware support for high-level languages, leading to the creation of such languages as PL/S, BLISS, BCPL, and ALGOL 68.

Then, in the 1970s, Dennis Ritchie created the C (C) programming language for the Unix operating system. Created with the B programming language, which didn’t even have support for typing, C was filled with powerful high-level functions that were best suited for writing operating systems and drivers. Several UNIX components, including its kernel, were eventually rewritten in C. Subsequently, many other system programs, including the Oracle database, much of the Windows source code, and the Linux operating system, were also written in C.

C received tremendous support in this direction. But what exactly made developers switch to it? Triplett believes that in order to motivate developers to switch from one programming language to another, the latter must first provide new features without losing old capabilities.

First, the language must offer “reasonably impressive” new features. “It can’t be a little better. It has to be significantly better to justify the effort and time it takes engineers to make the transition,” he explains. Compared to the assembly language, C had many things to offer. It supported somewhat secure typing, provided better portability and performance with high-level constructs, and generated generally much more readable code.

Second, the language had to provide support for old features, which meant that in the story of the move to C, developers had to make sure that it was just as feature-rich as the assembly language. Triplett explains, “The new language can’t just be better, it also has to be just as good. In addition to being faster and supporting all the data types that the assembly language could use, C also had what Triplett called an “escape hatch,” namely, it supported assembly language code inserts within it.
Triplett at the Rustconf 2019 conference in Portland, Ore.

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