Learning A New Programming Language per Year in the Age of AI

April 17th, 2026

People don’t really learn new programming languages every year anymore thanks to AI, so why do I stick with this activity? Call me old fashioned, but I still like to dive into a new programming language every year, no matter what, and thus here comes yet another update in my lifelong obsession to learn more and more programming languages.

The current list is the following; those languages that appear in the Conway Game of Life project appear in bold.

1992: QBasic
1993: Turbo Pascal
1994: ANSI C
1995: Delphi
1996: JavaScript. Others: HTML
1997: Java
1998: VBScript. Others: CSS
1999: Transact-SQL
2000: C#. Others: Prolog
2001: C++
2002: PHP. Others: C#
2003: Objective-C
2004: Visual Basic.NET
2005: Ruby
2006: LINQ. Others: C# 2.0, C++
2007: Erlang
2008: Python
2009: Go
2010: Common Lisp
2011: Haskell
2012: Lua
2013: C++ 11
2014: Scala
2015: Swift. Others: C++ 14
2016: Kotlin. Others: Swift 3, Java 1.7
2017: TypeScript. Others: 68K Assembler, PHP 7, awk
2018: F#. Others: C# 7, Elisp
2019: Go. Others: Scheme, Ballerina
2020: Smalltalk. Others: COBOL, Rexx
2021: Rust. Others: R
2022: Dart. Others: Elixir, Crystal, Perl, D
2023: Zig. Others: Minimal BASIC, Fortran
2024: Bash, Vala, APL
2025: C23, C++23
2026: Hare

Yes; the list above is 35 lines long. I can’t really believe it.

Hare

So yes, this year I dived into Hare, another one of those programming languages that aim to become the “next C”, allowing developers to write fast lower-level code, without… well, writing C. (Insert shrug emoji here.)

Here go some notes I took while diving into the subject, hopefully they’ll be useful to you too.

Home page.
Created by Drew DeVault
- Announcement and another announcement.
Source code
- Based on the QBE backend which I didn’t know about.
Standard library docs

This language has been around since 2022, so there’s already quite a few “first impressions” out there, that I recommend you read, too:

Quite a long (1 hour 40 minutes!) recording of a streaming session with an introduction to the language (published in 2024).
First impressions by Dhole
More impressions
And some very early impressions (2021) by Kiëd Llaentenn.

Finally, if you would like to see some example code written in Hare, I found the following:

There’s a “Hare by Example” website.
An operating system built with it, because why not.

In my own experiment, I literally gave Cursor the whole Conway project and asked it to translate it to Hare; and lo and behold, it succeeded, with just 3 iterations.

export fn main() void = {
	let w = world_new(30);

	const p1 = blinker(coord { x = 0, y = 1 });
	const p2 = beacon(coord { x = 10, y = 10 });
	const p3 = glider(coord { x = 4, y = 5 });
	const p4 = block(coord { x = 1, y = 10 });
	const p5 = block(coord { x = 18, y = 3 });
	const p6 = tub(coord { x = 6, y = 1 });

	seed(&w, p1[..]);
	seed(&w, p2[..]);
	seed(&w, p3[..]);
	seed(&w, p4[..]);
	seed(&w, p5[..]);
	seed(&w, p6[..]);

	let generation = 0;
	for (true) {
		generation += 1;
		world_print(w, generation);
		time::sleep(500 * time::MILLISECOND);
		w = world_evolve(w);
	};
};

Interestingly, of all the “C successor” languages (a select group where Rust and Zig appear as pioneers) Hare is the one that requires the least amount of code to reproduce this application, more or less the same as Java, Dart, or D, while Zig and Rust require slightly longer codebases (25% longer for Zig, 40% longer for Rust) for the same results.

All in all, I found Hare interesting; it is worth exploring it more in the future, although you might infer from the lack of enthusiasm in my writing that there wasn’t really anything special that caught my attention. It’s a commendable and interesting work for sure, but that’s all. (And, yes, I do sometimes expect a bit too much from programming languages, most probably.)