Software development is the fastest changing career out there, so it’s necessary to be on the ball when it comes to what may be round the corner. Check out these six programming languages that are likely to make waves in 2016.

Scala

Scala has been around for a while, well, at least longer than the other languages on this list. This functional and object oriented programming language is gaining ground with well-known organisations. Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, says it can be relied on for “large mission critical systems”, and companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and Intel are listening to him.

Hack

Whenever a company as large, powerful and influential as Facebook make something, you should pay attention. And if Facebook make their own programming language, then Software Developers around the world need to sit up and take notice. Hack was created in 2014, and Facebook have been steadily replacing PHP code on its site ever since. They have also released an open source version of the programming language, so expect big things from it in 2016.

Rust

Similar to C and C++, Rust was created by Mozilla in 2014 having been under development for several years. They describe it as a “new programming language which focuses on performance, parallelisation, and memory safety”. They believe that by building a programming language from scratch, they can get rid of the “baggage” that other languages have.

Go

Google Go, also known as Golang, was launched way back in 2009, and is derived from Java and C. Go is already being used by a number of significant organisations, from Facebook to the UK government. It’s creators say this open source language is “an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language.”.

Dart

Another Googles programming languages, Dart isn’t as popular as Go, but is gaining credence since its launch in 2011. Giving an alternative to Javascript, Google says Dart was designed to write development tools for modern app development, and is capable of high-performance implementations.

Erlang

Erlang is the oldest programming language on this list. It was developed waaaaaay back in the mid-nineties to run Ericsson’s telephone exchanges. It’s a relatively simple programming language designed for large, scalable and high-availability applications. WhatsApp trust Erlang to handle billions of messages sent across their App each day.