Top programming languages: Most popular and fastest growing choices for developers

JavaScript rules the roost, but Python is making huge gains.


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JavaScript is now used by more than 16.4 million developers globally, says a survey of more than 19,000 coders – making it the world’s most popular programming language “by a wide margin”.

SlashData’s 21st State of the Developer Nation Report examined global software developer trends across 160 countries during Q3 2021, covering programming languages, tools, APIs, apps and technology segments, as well as attitudes of developers themselves.

The report also looked at developer involvement in 5G and IoT, specifically how programmers were taking advantage of new advances in technology in tools, apps and services.

SEE: Programming languages: Python’s new developer in residence and their ‘make-it-or-break-it’ role

JavaScript’s ongoing popularity in web and backend applications supported its position as the most popular programming language in Q3 2021. While not necessarily a surprise in itself – JavaScript has, after all, been the world’s most-used language for a number of years now – SlashData found that upwards of 2.5 million developers had joined the JavaScript community in the past six months alone. That’s the same as the entire user base of Swift; or, the combined communities of Rust and Ruby.

The data for JavaScript also included language derivatives TypeScript and CoffeeScript.

Python might not be a close second, but its popularity is impressive nonetheless: according to SlashData, the language is now used by some 11.3 million coders, primarily within data science and machine learning, and IoT applications.

The brainchild of Guido van Rossum, Python’s popularity has exploded in recent years, overtaking that of Java, which is currently used by 9.6m developers. Java remains a go-to for mobile and desktop apps, SlashData’s survey found.

According to SlashData, Python added 2.3m developers to its community in the past 12 months. “That’s a 25% growth rate, one of the highest across all the large programming language communities of more than 7M users,” the report noted.

“The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python’s popularity. More than 70% of ML developers and data scientists report

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Python overtakes Java, JavaScript as most popular programming language for first time in 20 years

What just happened? For the 1st time in far more than 20 a long time, the Python programming language has overtaken Java, JavaScript, and C as the most common language. The up-to-date rankings for Oct exposed the achievement by using Tiobe, an index that calculates the conclusions primarily based on net searches.

Tiobe, a agency that focus in examining and tracking the high-quality of program, has tracked the popularity of programming languages for the earlier two a long time. It makes use of queries on well-liked look for engines and sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube to assemble its index. A full of 25 search engines and websites are examined in the method.

The index by itself is not about the best programming language per se or the language in which the most strains of code have been composed, but strictly the volume of lookups for languages on research engines. So although some may not just take the feat obtained by Python seriously dependent on the methodology used, it’s continue to an critical milestone specified it’s the initial time in 20 several years Python has topped the rankings.

“Python, which began as a simple scripting language, as an alternate to Perl, has develop into experienced. Its ease of understanding, its enormous volume of libraries, and its prevalent use in all forms of domains, has produced it the most well-liked programming language of right now,” reported Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen.

As shown in Tiobe’s ‘Programming Language of the Year’ list, awarded for possessing the greatest increase in scores in a yr, Python has held by itself in the discussion amongst the other preferred languages because 2007 by profitable four periods.

Python topping the index, nonetheless, was not essentially for the reason that of an boost in lookups. In its place, other languages falling in queries saw that an 11.27 p.c share for Python was more than enough for it to acquire the guide. C fell 5.79 per cent compared to Oct 2020 for an 11.16 % share on the index, though Java fell 2.11 p.c to 10.46 per cent.

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