Top Programming Languages That Will Future-Proof Your Portfolio
The most popular programming languages are used to code most of the applications in the world. Here are the 10 most popular now -- and insight into a handful on a rocket up the charts.
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Every year there are lists about programming languages. The 10 most popular, the 10 least popular, the 10 most searched for, most loved, most hated …you get it. In the world of programming languages there are constant lists, but the ones that matter are those that help you plan your future or plan your development teams.
One of the companies that keeps a regular list of the most commonly used languages is TIOBE, a Netherlands-based company that evaluates code for quality. It's a list that shows the relative popularity of languages it is testing right now. We used its work as the basis for choosing the languages presented here because it is a good snapshot of the development market as it exists right now.
Another way of looking at the market for programming languages is through the lens of companies hiring programmers. This is more a view to the future, since even agile-based organizations will tend to have a lag measured in weeks to months between hiring a developer and seeing the first deployable code from the developer's keyboard.
Toptal is a company that acts as a broker between developers and the companies that want to hire them. It has a list of the most popular languages used in hiring searches -- a list that doesn't directly track to the TIOBE list.
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Alvaro Oliveira is VP of talent operations for Toptal. When I spoke with him on the phone about Toptal's list, we opened with the No. 1 language companies are searching for: Swift. "Swift is new, so it's expected for its growth to be way higher than any other languages," Oliveira said. "It's also the language that has allowed a lot of people to join the iOS market."
Oliveira said that Swift's growth is coming from two sources: Those moving their programming from Objective C, and those coming into the iOS development market for the first time. "The iOS programming market was always held back by Objective C, which is a language that a lot of people found uninviting," he said. "But then Swift came along and was much easier."
The other language at the top of Toptal's chart is HTML. "For any web project, HTML is going to be there. Whether it's a Ruby on Rails or Rython job, HTML will be there. It shows that Web pages are still in demand," Oliveira said.
There was at least one language on the Toptal list that I found quite surprising, but I'll wait until later in the article to talk about it. Until then, let's take a look at the languages most commonly used in March 2016, and see how many of them you have in your project portfolio.
Once you've reviewed our list, tell us in the comments section below which of these are in use in your organization right now, and which ones you're personally working with.
Unlike many of the languages covered in this article, Ruby is not primarily a scripting language. It is, rather, an object-oriented, compiled, full-featured programming language with a syntax that should be familiar to anyone who knows Python or Perl.
Ruby has been used to code frameworks and controllers, most notably Ruby on Rails, which provides structures for Web pages, databases, and other complex applications. While the two share language, they are not the same and should not be confused for one another.
At the beginning of this article I mentioned another set of languages that surprised me as a direction for the future. The surprising languages are React and React Native.
If you don't know about React and React Native, then you're already behind the curve. React is the Javascript framework that allows you to build applications with a Facebook interface. React Native is a further extension of the concept to let you build iOS and Android (and even set-top box) apps with Javascript.
Alvaro Oliveira said that these two frameworks are seeing tremendous growth in the number of companies looking for programming talent. Given their basis, they make a compelling case for learning Javascript and then adding React as a way to improve your chances of getting hired in 2016 and 2017.
That, then, is the list of current top languages, with some future language thrown in for good measure. What other languages do you think programmers should know? Do you think it's a mistake not to have HTML5 on our list? Why? It's a great set of questions -- and the answers are sure to be as diverse as the languages themselves. Let's talk about it in the comments section below.
Unlike many of the languages covered in this article, Ruby is not primarily a scripting language. It is, rather, an object-oriented, compiled, full-featured programming language with a syntax that should be familiar to anyone who knows Python or Perl.
Ruby has been used to code frameworks and controllers, most notably Ruby on Rails, which provides structures for Web pages, databases, and other complex applications. While the two share language, they are not the same and should not be confused for one another.
At the beginning of this article I mentioned another set of languages that surprised me as a direction for the future. The surprising languages are React and React Native.
If you don't know about React and React Native, then you're already behind the curve. React is the Javascript framework that allows you to build applications with a Facebook interface. React Native is a further extension of the concept to let you build iOS and Android (and even set-top box) apps with Javascript.
Alvaro Oliveira said that these two frameworks are seeing tremendous growth in the number of companies looking for programming talent. Given their basis, they make a compelling case for learning Javascript and then adding React as a way to improve your chances of getting hired in 2016 and 2017.
That, then, is the list of current top languages, with some future language thrown in for good measure. What other languages do you think programmers should know? Do you think it's a mistake not to have HTML5 on our list? Why? It's a great set of questions -- and the answers are sure to be as diverse as the languages themselves. Let's talk about it in the comments section below.
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