IEEE ‘Top Programming Languages’
IEEE Spectrum have released their annual results for The Top Programming Languages.
Can you guess the "top" language? What even is a "top" language, really?
In terms of job market ("looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for"), this is how it looks:
You would think because I have good knowledge of all but SAS and Apex on this list that I would be turning down work left, right, and center. You would be wrong. Knowing and having experience of in-demand languages without a computer science degree while in your 50s only makes you a tiny bit more interesting at nerd gatherings. And nerds don't gather very much.
As many online have pointed out, I do have a few issues with methodology, but they are well aware that it is not a perfect study.
Since 2013, we've been metaphorically peering over the shoulders of programmers to create our annual interactive rankings of the most popular programming languages. But fundamental shifts in how people are coding may not just make it harder to measure popularity, but could even make the concept itself irrelevant.
Heck, how would you do it? By lines of code currently in production would likely be dominated by COBOL. Some of those systems are so vital nobody dare touch them (I actually quite like COBOL).
They mix dialects and flavours together too (as Hackaday point out, Arduino is C/C++, not its own thing!). In fact, for jobs in particular, C/C++/C#/ObjectiveC should perhaps go together in another chart. I'm not convinced JavaScript and TypeScript should be split either.
It is funny to me how many of the popular languages right now are "We are doing C, but better" languages such as Rust, Go, Zig, and such. Go and Zig are cool so I am ok with it.
HTML is in there. Hmmm ... I understand why but to me, regardless of if you think of it as a language or not, it's like saying that jobs require typing skills. Also, is it useful for getting an idea of employability? I doubt it.
What are the most important languages right now?
Scripting: Python. Used to be Perl, there is still a lot of value in knowing Bash, but Python is the swiss army knife.
Low-level and Embedded: C. I don't even include C++. Pretty much everything I need to do lower level (or "bare metal) I can do in C, and I do a fair amount.
Web backend: PHP. Yes, Node is getting a larger and larger portion of my daily backend web work, but WordPress still dominates commercial web development, plus there is something so convenient about being able to still upload a .PHP file rather than have to put up a reverse proxy on your web server just to output Hello World.
Web ui: JavaScript. Again, it is not perfect by any means, and I really dislike the "front end framework of the week" popularity contest between all the frickin' react/next/yada. You have to know JavaScript, period.
Desktop and Mobile: I used to be an MVP for .NET (Microsoft's community contribution award) but that was 20 years ago and things are not so simple as "develop for Windows as if nothing else exists". This is where it gets tricky, and it is not just about the languages, it is the whole toolchain and ecosystem. I've tried Swift, I like it but it is stuck in Apple world, even though you can compile text-based binaries for other OS. Java is still popular, especially in enterprise and on Android, of course, but you can't develop for iOS with it. Kotlin and C# have cross-platform options but when I try those options I don't get very far, especially the build and packaging deployment options. Probably a me issue rather than the platforms. Qt seems a great solution until you see the costs unless your project is opensource.
Looking at that I am in pretty good shape apart from desktop and mobile development. Fortunately for me, a lot of the desktop and mobile work has moved to web apps or native apps that are essentially web apps!
My on again off again hobby desktop project is a markdown text editor and that is built with JavaScript and built with Electron.
Electron is awful from an efficiency point of view, anyone who uses Slack and other Electron apps know how bloated the binaries are. But from a developer perspective it is really nice, it can be deployed to Linux, Mac, and Windows, and you don't have to worry about juggling various GUI implementations because the embedded browser takes care of rendering.
Several projects, notably Deno, are working on similar tooling but instead of embedding a browser with webview they are looking to use whatever browser you already have installed, making the deployment much smaller.
I thought Java was dead. I am kind of surprised to see it so high in the list. SQL makes a lot of sense to me and that is just a really good reminder of how bad I dropped the ball not becoming proficient at it! I agree that while html is technically a language, it doesn't really belong in the list with the other ones.
A good percentage of Java is because of the cost of replacing it, in the same way COBOL sticks around, it is just too important to break and it still works. Android development is a large part of it too, even though there are new more sexier options for that :)
Interesting. I guess that makes sense.
I've used a fair few of those, but don't know what SAS and Apex are. I've heard people rave about Ruby and Rust so it might be fun to look at those. I quite like to have a course to follow and I do have access to some via work. It's just a matter of having the time. I've been doing some music courses lately as I spend enough time coding for work, which is all Python. There are plenty of areas I have not explored, but I may have to wait for retirement (not too far away) to play with those. A friend who retired recently is into microcontrollers, but he plays around with all sorts of weird stuff. It's always good to have a project with some goals to motivate you.
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SAS is math so not for me ;) Apex is for salesforce so I might have done some without knowing!
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