Have you ever stopped to wonder why so many of our most beloved programming tools are named after creatures from the animal kingdom? Back in 2018, I opened the gates of this zoo for the first time. At that time I welcomed Python, Rhino, Impala, GNU, the Gecko, and many others into their enclosures. Readers joined, and they did not come empty-handed. Comments kept arriving: “You forgot the Gopher!” “What about Rust’s Crab?” “And the Llama is everywhere now!”
Eight years is a long time in technology. Entire new habitats have appeared. AI has transformed the jungle. The cloud has raised entirely new species. And a few delightfully mad creatures have crawled out of the esoteric swamps just to remind us that programming can, above all, be funny. And with the help of AI, this research is much easier than in 2018.
It is time to update the keeper’s log. Welcome to the 2026 edition of the Zoo of programming languages.
Swift
Swift is Apple’s modern, open-source programming language, introduced in 2014 as a replacement for the aging Objective-C. It was designed from the ground up to be fast, safe and expressive. “Blazingly fast” is the phrase Apple themselves use, and that is not idle boasting – Swift consistently outperforms its predecessor in benchmarks while offering a clean, readable syntax that developers genuinely enjoy. Today it powers everything from iPhone apps to server-side backends, and its open-source community has made it far bigger than Apple’s own garden.
The other Swift is the common swift (Apus apus) (or Gierzwaluw in Dutch), a small migratory bird and one of the most remarkable fliers on the planet. A swift spends almost its entire life in the air, eating, drinking, mating and sleeping on the wing. Young swifts have been recorded flying continuously for up to ten months without once landing. They are among the fastest birds in level flight, reaching speeds of over 110 km/h. If you are going to name a language after speed and effortless endurance, you could not choose a more fitting creature.
Go (The Gopher)
Go, often called Golang, was conceived at Google in 2007 and released publicly in 2009. The motivation was practical and urgent: Google’s codebases had grown so vast that compilation times in C++ had become a serious productivity problem. Go was designed to compile in seconds, handle massive concurrency gracefully through its famous Goroutines, and keep the language specification small enough that any engineer could learn it in a weekend. Today it underpins an enormous portion of modern cloud infrastructure – Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform are all written in Go. When you push a container into production, there is a good chance a Gopher is somewhere in the chain.
The other Gopher is the pocket gopher, a small burrowing rodent native to North and Central America. Gophers are tireless, methodical engineers. They excavate elaborate tunnel systems with separate chambers for sleeping, storing food, and raising young, almost entirely out of sight beneath the surface. This is, of course, a perfect metaphor for Go’s role in the technology stack. The Gopher is never in the spotlight. It is down there in the infrastructure, quietly keeping everything running.
Rust (The Crab)
Rust is a systems programming language that set out to solve a problem as old as software itself: memory bugs. Buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, data races – these are the silent killers of C and C++ programs. Rust’s answer is an ownership and borrowing system that enforces memory safety at compile time, with zero runtime overhead. If it compiles, it is (almost certainly) safe. First released by Mozilla in 2015, Rust has since been adopted by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and, most significantly, the Linux kernel itself. It has been voted the “most admired programming language” in Stack Overflow’s developer survey for nine consecutive years. That is not a coincidence.
The Rust Spotted Guard Crab, (Trapezia rufopunctata) is also known as the Red Spotted Guard Crab in some areas. They spend their entire lives living between the branches of corals of the Pocillopora and Acropora families. They have a mutualistic relationship with these corals and guard them against certain predators, among them the Crown of Thorns Starfish.
LLaMA (The Llama)
LLaMA, the Large Language Model of Meta AI, is not a programming language in the traditional sense, but it has become the common tongue of a generation of AI developers. First released by Meta in early 2023, LLaMA was the breakthrough that made running powerful large language models on ordinary hardware feasible. The open-weights releases spawned an entire ecosystem of fine-tuned variants: Alpaca, Vicuna, Mistral and dozens more. If you are running a local AI assistant today, there is an excellent chance it traces its lineage back to a LLaMA. In terms of shaping how AI software is written and deployed, few releases in recent memory have been as consequential.
The other Llama (Lama glama) is a domesticated South American camelid that has been used as a pack animal by Andean cultures for a long time before the Inca. Llamas are hardy, intelligent, and surprisingly strong for their size, capable of carrying up to 30% of their body weight across mountainous terrain for many kilometres. They are also famously stubborn: overload a lama, and it will simply sit down and refuse to move until the burden is reduced to something reasonable. Meta’s LLaMA models have something of the same character; they carry an enormous load of knowledge with remarkable efficiency, but push them beyond their context window, and they too will start to sit down and make things up.
Pony (The Pony)
Pony is a statically typed, compiled programming language built around the actor model of concurrency. Released in 2015, it was designed with a single audacious goal: to make it impossible to write programs that deadlock or have data races. Pony achieves this through a capability-based type system called reference capabilities, which encodes sharing and mutation rules directly into the type of every variable. The result is a language that is genuinely difficult to crash, not because it protects you at runtime, but because the compiler will not allow the dangerous patterns to exist in the first place. It is a niche language, beloved by those who know it and largely unknown to those who do not, which is itself very much in the spirit of the pony.
The other Pony is a small horse, typically under 14.2 hands in height. The most famous breed is the Shetland pony, originating from the harsh Shetland Isles of Scotland, where the combination of limited food and severe weather produced an animal of extraordinary hardiness and strength relative to its size. Shetland ponies are famously sure-footed, intelligent and, like the language, much tougher than their compact appearance suggests. Do not be fooled by the name.
COW (The Cow)
COW is an esoteric programming language (a joke language, to be direct about it) that consists of exactly twelve instructions, every single one of which is a variation of the word “moo.” The instructions are case-sensitive, so moo, mOo, moO, mOO, Moo, MOo, MOO, OOM, oom, oOM, oOm and oom are all distinct operations. Unbelievably, COW is Turing-complete. You can, in principle, write any computable function in COW. In practice, you would arrive at retirement before you finished a sorting algorithm, but the theoretical possibility is there. COW has no practical use whatsoever and is all the better for it.
The other Cow (Bos taurus) is one of the most successful and widespread large mammals on Earth, with approximately one billion individuals alive today. The domestic cow is famous for its patience, its repetitive lowing, and its tendency to stand in a field doing apparently nothing for very long periods of time. A COW developer will recognise all of these traits instantly.
Chicken (The Chicken)
Chicken is, if anything, even more extreme than COW. It is an esoteric language in which the only valid token is the word “chicken.” The entire semantics of a Chicken program are determined by counting the number of times “chicken” appears on each line. That is it. That is the entire specification. It was created in 2002 by Torbjörn Söderstedt, and the paper presenting it, “Chicken,” is a masterwork of academic parody. Like COW, Chicken is Turing-complete, which says less about Chicken and more about how remarkably low the bar for Turing-completeness turns out to be.
The other Chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the most numerous bird on the planet, with over 33 billion alive at any given moment. The domestic chicken has a limited but enthusiastic vocabulary, primarily variations of “cluck”, and a brain that, while surprisingly capable in some respects, is not generally celebrated for its versatility. It is the perfect mascot for a language whose entire vocabulary is a single word, repeated until something happens.
Add Your Animals
The zoo is never finished. There are almost certainly more programming languages, frameworks, databases, and tools lurking in the undergrowth that belong behind one of these fences. If you know of one, please add it as a comment below, and I will add it to the collection. Together, we can cover the entire animal kingdom.
Sources: Wikipedia, official language documentation. With thanks to all the readers who contributed to the 2018 original.
