When developers look back on 2010, they may be forgiven if their eyes glaze over and the events of the past year seem to blur. After all, five major languages saw major releases, while each gravitated toward cloud-based environments.
Within the Java community, there was the schism that emerged in the vote over the specifications for Java 7 and 8, with Apache ultimately breaking from database giant Oracle, which earlier in the year had won the support of IBM, which joined the OpenJDK effort in October.
Then it was also a banner year for Ruby, which in August saw the release of Ruby on Rails 3, the culmination of a two-year development effort. Perl saw a major update in 2010 and PHP added new tools and faced a concerted security challenge, while Python moved past the 2.x releases and began nudging developers toward 3.x. Developer.com recaps the year in open source.
2010 was a busy year for open source programming languages, with major new releases and upheavals that will shape the development landscape for years to come.
Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Python all had language and related tools releases this year with cloud development a key focus for most of them.
