IEEE Spectrum has released its 11th annual ranking of the most popular programming languages. It combines a variety of metrics from multiple sources to create three meta-rankings. The Spectrum ranking looks at what IEEE members are using, the Trending ranking looks at what languages are trending, and the Jobs ranking looks at what employers are looking for.
At number one, Python continues to solidify its overall dominance, helped by things like its popular libraries for both artificial intelligence and its pedagogical popularity (for most students today, if they learn one programming language in school, it’s Python). Python is also quite popular with employers, though its lead over other general-purpose languages is not as large, and as was the case last year, it plays second fiddle to SQL, the database query language that employers prefer to see paired with another language.
SQL’s popularity among employers is a natural extension of today’s focus on network and cloud architectures, where databases become the natural storage for all the data that program logic chews up.
Rising Stars and Changing Trends
Languages like Java, JavaScript, and C++ also maintain their high positions, but what’s particularly interesting is what’s happening just below them. TypeScript has moved up several places across all rankings, especially in the Jobs ranking, where it took fourth place, up from 11th last year. The main difference between TypeScript and JavaScript is static typing of variables, where the type of a variable — integer, floating point, text, and so on — must be declared before it can be used. This allows for error checking during compilation and increased reliability.
Another leader in growth is Rust. Unlike C or C++, Rust is “memory safe,” meaning it uses various techniques to ensure that programs cannot write to places in memory that they shouldn’t. Such errors are one of the main sources of security vulnerabilities. Rust has seen a surge in popularity, thanks to things like the February White House cybersecurity report calling for memory-safe languages to replace C and C++. Indeed, C appears to be in decline, falling from fourth to ninth place in Spectrum and from seventh to 13th in Jobs.
Two languages are new to the list: Apex and Solidity. Apex is for building business apps that use the Salesforce server as a backend, while Solidity is for building smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
A few languages have also dropped out of the rankings this year. That doesn’t mean the language is completely dead, just that the signal for these languages is too weak to rank them meaningfully. Among the languages that have dropped out is Forth, which is still popular among people building retro 8-bit systems due to its small size. Weak signal is also why hyped languages like Zig weren’t included in the rankings, even though people who know it can obviously command high salaries.
While other languages come and go in the rankings, we can give credit to the immortal languages Fortran and COBOL. Despite being around 65 years old, employers are still looking for programmers in both languages. For Fortran, it’s usually a select group of people who are also well versed in high-energy physics. COBOL is more widely sought after, as many government and financial systems still rely on infrastructure built over decades, and the recent crippling impact of the Cloudstrike/Microsoft Windows incident probably didn’t do much to replace them!
IEEE Spectrum is the flagship journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one of the world’s largest professional organizations, notes NIX Solutions. The journal specializes in publishing articles related to engineering, technology and science, covering a wide range of topics including electronics, computer science, robotics, telecommunications, biomedical engineering and many other areas.
We’ll keep you updated on any significant changes in the programming language landscape as they occur.