Not one programming language is better than all others. Programmers often use several languages on a daily basis anyway, depending on their needs. If they want to stay relevant in this fast-paced domain, programmers must keep up to date with trends and shifts in the programming industry.
Following last year’s infographic on the Top Programming Languages to Learn in 2017, here’s an update of the rankings as of August 2018.
List of Programming Language Rankings
The infographic analysis is based on the following well-known rankings and indexes:
- The Tiobe Index which, put simply, analyzes search engine queries using the keyword “<language_name> programming”.
- The PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index which is based on Google trends and looks for queries using “tutorial” instead of “programming”.
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings which use both StackOverflow (occurrences of tags) and Github (number of projects) to compare languages.
- GitHub Octoverse which ranks languages based on the number of pull requests opened on GitHub.
(GitHub Octoverse 2018 should be released this September, I’ll update the data accordingly)
There are a few other resources worth mentioning when you intend to compare programming languages:
- The Stack OverFlow survey. Each year, the survey results provide more and more interesting insights about the developer job. In 2017, the most loved languages were Rust, Kotlin and Python.
- The IEEE Spectrum Ranking. This ranking takes into account over 10 criteria: from Google searches to HackerNews top links.
Main Trends
Python is on The Rise
Python now ranks #1 in the PYPL Index, in front of Java. It grew the most in the last 5 years gaining 14.3 points while PHP was losing the most (-6.5).
The rise is also significative on the TIOBE Index. Python won 1 place to C# and now ranks #4, really close to the top 3. As TIOBE’s august headline outlines, the industry is adopting Python in a lot of domains. The growth of interest in machine learning certainly has something to do with it too.
Rapid Growth for Kotlin and TypeScript
The ascendance of Kotlin in the Redmonk ranking is truly remarkable. Since last year and Google’s announcement of making Kotlin a first-class language for making Android apps, the language has gained almost 40 ranks. Even if it suffered a minor step back last quarter, the future of the language still looks promising.
TypeScript also suffered a step back in Redmonk’s ranking last quarter. But if we look at the progress over a year, TypeScript has won a few ranks in both the PYPL index and the Redmonk’s ranking. According to GitHub Octoverse, the number of pull requests opened has quadrupled over a year.
Which programming language have you planned to learn for 2019? I’ll personally go for Kotlin since I have a Java background.