Being this my first time at Strange Loop, I wasn't sure what to expect of the "pre-conference" offerings. I had the option of attending hand-picked workshops or a day-long event called "Emerging Languages Camp." Having never been to either, I decided to register for the ELC, and in retrospective, that was a good decision. Schedule for ELC can be found here: https://thestrangeloop.com/preconf-page/preconf-schedule
The first thing I noticed is that the "Emerging" part of the name is not a marketing gimmick at all, it actually represents the true nature of the camp. Most languages presented there are in the early stages of development and a few are in the conceptual stage seeking fresh sets of eyes and ideas for further development.
The camp has a fast-paced format with each presenter getting a maximum of thirty minutes, which means that presenters who lack the cadence, presentation skills or that veer off into platitudes wound up in bad shape in so far as making their case is concerned.
The target niches for the languages presented is wide and vast so obviously many of them are outside my area of expertise or interest. Of those who I found interesting, the following are, in my opinion, a few notable ones that are worth keeping your eye on:
Elm: a very interesting and nifty language (that transpiles to JS). Definitely one of the languages with clearest road map. Its home page can be found here: http://elm-lang.org
Shen: based on the popular Clojure, but with stronger type system, consistent lambda calculus support and even a fully functional embedded version of Prolog. More detailed info can be found at: http://www.shenlanguage.org/
Roy: is one of the increasing number of languages (or dialects, if you prefer) transpiling to JS. However, Roy tries to augment and ameliorate some of the issues that people most often complain about JS in regards to lack of types and truthy syntax. http://roylang.org
Julia: if you've ever used/endured writing numerical analysis code in Matlab, Mathematica or any other number crunching languages, Julia will be a welcome sight. Optimized for numerical analysis and distributed execution, the language shows a lot of promise. For more details, check out their page http://julialang.org/
Rust: concurrency- and performance-optimized language with a syntax similar to that of C yet very different to C under the hood. For tutorials and docs, see http://rust-lang.org
Again, I'd like to emphasize that the above weren't the only interesting languages of the day. Far from it, there were many cool and intriguing languages that were showcased, but the ones above were "up my alley", so to speak.
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