It’s hard to miss the giants of coding because they show up everywhere in college courses, dominate job postings, and run huge, enterprise-level systems. However, there are more options than just the big names, and they deserve a lot of attention too.
Picking a language isn’t a one-time decision, and it doesn’t have to be whatever is popular by default. There are plenty of niche languages that may make you a better programmer, and you may learn to love them.
Elixir
Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek | Elixir
If you’ve ever jumped into a voice chat or sent a message on Discord, you’ve actually been seeing the power of Elixir at work. Discord has used Elixir since the beginning as the core infrastructure for its chat, allowing it to easily handle over 11 million users simultaneously and process huge amounts of real-time content.
Elixir operates on the BEAM. This is the Erlang Virtual Machine, which is designed for telecom systems that literally cannot afford downtime. This underlying structure is why Elixir can deliver low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems, giving everyday web developers that same, serious reliability you’d expect from a major phone company.
Elixir has a modern, clear syntax that looks a lot like Ruby, complete with those standard do ” end blocks. So you get to write clean, immutable code without having to deal with the typical steep learning curve you find in other functional languages.
Lua
Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek | Lua
This scripting language is a huge, often unseen part of modern software development. It doesn’t work as a standalone application builder. Instead, Lua is a compact, embedded extension language designed to integrate perfectly with host programs written in C or C++.
It is the connecting piece that lets you customize complex software and extend functionality without needing to modify or recompile the core engine’s source code. This makes Lua a good choice for the video game industry. It powers the user interface and scripting logic of huge titles like World of Warcraft and Grim Fandango. Lua is the foundation for the Roblox platform (specifically its derivative, Luau).
It’s incredibly fast, and it focuses on mechanisms over policies, avoiding complex feature sets in favor of one highly flexible data structure called the table. This minimal setup means Lua can be ported to almost any platform without creating software bloat.
Zig
Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek | Zig
If you think C has too steep a learning curve, Zig may be a good alternative. It feels a lot like a modern successor to C. It focuses hard on simplicity and maintainability without sacrificing that deep, low-level control needed for systems programming. There’s absolutely no hidden control flow, unlike C++ or Rust, where operator overloading or hidden destructors might obscure what a line of code is actually doing.
Zig makes sure that if a snippet doesn’t look like a function call, it isn’t one. This clarity also applies to memory management. You won’t find any hidden allocations, no new keyword, and no garbage collector running in the background. Instead, the language forces developers to be keenly aware of where bytes live by requiring allocators to be passed explicitly to any function that needs them. Now, this manual approach sounds a little scary, but Zig modernizes everything with strong safety features that help mitigate the dangerous pitfalls typical of C.
Clojure
Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek | Clojure
Clojure is a dynamic Lisp dialect that runs right on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It’s your code as if it were just data, so it lets you manipulate the language itself using its macro system. Since it doesn’t have rigid syntax like many other languages, its macros let you ditch all the standard boilerplate and even build small domain-specific languages tailored to what they are trying to solve.
You get to mold the language around the solution instead of forcing your problem to fit the language’s built-in limits. This power comes with a pretty radical approach to state management, too. It completely avoids the mutable state that is the default in most object-oriented languages.
Instead, Clojure clearly separates identity (the stable logical entity) from state (basically an immutable snapshot of that entity at one specific moment). This makes reasoning about even the most complex systems much easier.
Julia
Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek | Julia
Julia solves the two-language problem, which is basically when developers prototype algorithms in a user-friendly, high-level language like Python or R, only to have to rewrite them completely in C or C++ for real production. This language has the ease of use and readability of Python, but it still has the sheer velocity of C.
It uses the LLVM framework, letting Julia compile generic formulas into efficient machine code right at runtime. You can write clear, abstract code that looks like a mathematical notation without having to sacrifice computational power. It’s one of those unusual langauges you should take a look at.
The language has a sophisticated multiple dispatch system. Julia’s system picks the appropriate function implementation based on the types of all arguments passed to it. This makes the code incredibly expressive and modular, for a paradigm where algorithms can be written abstractly and yet still execute efficiently on different data types.
This unique architecture means this language is great for high-performance scientific computing, particularly where the two-language problem was causing the most pain. It is currently used for complex climate models, like those by Climate Modeling Alliance, which simulate Earth systems on supercomputers.
Rust
Credit: Ground Picture / Shutterstock
You might debate whether Rust is still niche or if it’s totally mainstream now, but you can’t deny how much love it gets. You should learn Rust because it gives you the raw, bare-metal speed you get from C++ but skips the segmentation faults and memory leaks that have messed up systems programming for years.
Rust’s secret weapon is definitely the borrow checker, which is a tough set of rules that the compiler enforces. This makes sure memory is handled safely without needing a slow garbage collector. Languages like Go or Java rely on a runtime process to tidy up unused memory, but it handles memory deterministically by making sure every piece of data has just one owner, and that memory is immediately freed the second the owner goes out of scope.
This lets Rust get rid of whole categories of bugs, things like null pointer dereferencing and data races, before your code even gets a chance to run. The compiler can feel like a real jerk sometimes, refusing to run the code until every single memory rule is absolutely perfect, but you can’t fault it for that because it basically moves the stress of debugging from runtime right into compile time.
These languages are a great reminder that the best solution for a specific problem isn’t usually found in the most common choices. Choosing a language should be a strategic decision, not a default setting based on what you’re used to.
Whether you need to build ultra-reliable distributed systems, embed high-speed scripting into an existing application, chase mathematical precision, or navigate complex, memory-safe systems programming, the perfect language is out there. So step off that well-worn path and pick a different language.
