Welcome to
IEEE Spectrum’s eleventh annual rankings of the preferred programming languages. As at all times, we mix a number of metrics from totally different sources to create three meta rankings. The Spectrum rating is weighted in direction of the profile of the everyday IEEE member, the Trending rating seeks to identify languages which might be within the zeitgeist, and the Jobs rating measures what employers are in search of.
You will discover a full breakdown of our methodology here, however let’s soar into our outcomes. On the high, Python continues to cement its general dominance, buoyed by issues like well-liked libraries for warm fields reminiscent of A.I. in addition to its pedagogical prominence. (For many college students right this moment, in the event that they study one programming language in class, it’s Python.) Python’s fairly well-liked with employers too, though there its lead over different different normal objective languages will not be as massive and, like final yr, it performs second fiddle to the database question language
SQL, which employers wish to see paired with one other language. SQL reputation with employers is a pure extension of right this moment’s emphasis on networked and cloud-based system architectures, the place databases turn into the pure repository for all of the bytes a program’s logic is chewing on.
Stalwarts like Java, Javascript, and C++ additionally retain excessive rankings, nevertheless it’s what’s occurring a bit additional down that’s significantly fascinating. Typescript—a superset of Javascript—strikes up a number of locations on all of the rankings, particularly for Jobs, the place it climbs to fourth place, versus eleventh final yr. Typescript’s main differentiator over Javascript is that it enforces static typing of variables, the place the kind of a variable—integer, floating level, textual content, and so forth.—have to be declared earlier than it may be used. This permits for extra error checking when Typescript packages are compiled to Javascript, and the rise in reliability has confirmed interesting.
One other climber is Rust, a language aimed toward creating system software program, like C or C++. However in contrast to these two languages, Rust is “reminiscence protected”, that means it makes use of a wide range of methods to make sure packages can’t write to areas in reminiscence that they aren’t alleged to. Such errors are a significant supply of safety vulnerabilities. Rust’s profile has been rising sharply, boosted by issues like a February cybersecurity report from the White House calling for reminiscence protected languages to interchange C and and C++. Certainly, C’s reputation seems to be on the wane, falling from fourth to ninth place on the Spectrum rating and from seventh to thirteenth on the Jobs rating.
Two languages have entered the rankings for the primary time:
Apex and Solidity. Apex is designed for constructing enterprise functions that use a Salesforce server as a backend, and Solidity is designed for creating good contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
This yr additionally noticed a number of languages drop out of the rankings. This doesn’t imply a language is totally lifeless, it simply signifies that these languages’ sign is just too weak to permit them to be meaningfully ranked. Languages that dropped out included
Forth, a private favourite of mine that’s nonetheless well-liked with of us constructing 8-bit retro programs due to its tiny footprint. A weak sign can be why we haven’t included some buzzy languages reminiscent of Zig, though these proficient in it could possibly apparently command some high salaries.
As these different languages come and go from the rankings, I’ve to present the shout out to the immortals,
Fortran and Cobol. Though they’re round 65 years previous, you may nonetheless discover employers in search of programmers in each. For Fortran, this tends to be for a choose group of people who find themselves additionally snug with high-energy physics, particularly the type of high-energy physics that goes boom (and with the safety clearances to match). Cobol is extra broadly in demand, as many authorities and monetary programs nonetheless depend on decades-old infrastructure—and the current paralyzing impression of the Cloudstrike/Microsoft Windows outage incident in all probability hasn’t accomplished a lot to encourage their substitute!
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