Hyped and Overhyped Programming Languages in 2026

Every few years the industry rediscovers that programming languages are not religions. Then we immediately behave like they are religions. Someone posts a benchmark. Someone else says memory safety. Someone says developer experience. A distributed systems person appears from under a bridge and whispers “Erlang solved this in 1998.” A startup founder announces they are rewriting their CRUD app in Rust because “performance.” A senior engineer quietly opens another Java service and gets paid. So le