What programming language do you use in 2022?
Are you deciding on which language to learn or use for a new project?
There are numerous reasons to choose for one or another, but at least you want to make sure that the language of choice remains relevant. But what are the current trends in programming languages? And when we know what languages are popular, does that mean that we should use them too? We will explore this by looking at the kind of people that are using these languages right now.
You might already code as a hobby. But will languages used by hobbyists be used by professionals? Or stated otherwise; is it natural that ‘hobby languages’ will be used in the professional environment later on?
Which programming languages are popular in 2022?
For this question to answer, we take a look at the historical data from the StackOverflow annual developer survey. This gives us the percentage of respondents that are using a particular language. We can plot this per year and language to see the trends in popularity. To add the predictions, we can fit a curve and extend it to the year 2022.
The chart above displays the languages sorted by their predicted usage in 2022. Dashed lines indicate that its usage is declining. Python took the 3th-place from Java in the 2019 survey. And this is no coincidence according to the predictions. Another promising, yet still little language is Elixir. And let’s not forget that C is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2022. But the most popular languages remain JavaScript, SQL, and Python.
JavaScript
It was designed for the web, and the rise of web applications seems like an important cause for its usage. But JavaScript is getting more applications, such as NodeJS and Cloud Functions.
SQL
It hasn’t got any serious competition since its introduction in 1974. Is there an alternative? The obvious answer is NoSQL, but that’s not a language and not as flexible as SQL. So, unless you’ve ever heard of Tutorial D, there is no competitor in the field. SQL never dies. Learn today and use for life!
Python
This is a good all-rounder and easy to get started. It is popular for web applications, command-line tools, and data science. Python is also becoming more dominant in universities.
What not to use?
Nobody wants to code countless hours in a ceasing language. But what languages are? The 10 fastest declining languages are in the graph below.
We should stay away from Go, according to this graph. Its usage increased in recent years, but the reason to fall off lies in the steep fall after 2014. This seems also to be the case for TypeScript, which usage is predicted to stop in 2023.
Remember CoffeeScript? It added concise syntax to JavaScript. But it isn’t popular anymore since newer JavaScript versions have introduced similar syntax in its core. The same might be the case for TypeScript since it’s also a language that adds syntax to JavaScript. However, there are reasons to call this prediction into doubt. There have been initiatives to bring typing to JavaScript, such as SoundScript and Strong Mode. But these solutions lack maturity. TypeScript might be overtaken by JavaScript itself, but that point isn’t close.
Who is using these languages?
Learning more about these people may tell us more about what these languages are used for. The survey data from 2019 is used to create a decision tree. In such a tree, we ask one yes / no question at a time which then gives the best split in groups that are, and that is not using this language. Let’s look at the trees for the 3 most popular languages.
JavaScript
68% percent of JavaScript coders are developer by profession. The usage is highest among people with an undergraduate major in web development or design. Higher educated people are not so likely to use JavaScript.
SQL
There are two groups which high usage of SQL in this tree. The highest is the hobby coders not using containers (Docker) or Windows. This is a very small group with only 178 respondents out of 68342. The other group, with 3198 developers, are using Windows and are professional developers who completed an industry certification program. Teenage programmers are the least likely to use SQL.
Python
Many Python developers work on Linux. One cause might be that Python ships by default in many Linux distributions. The second question to ask if you are a professional developer. Unless from the US, a Python developer is more likely to code for study or hobby. The biggest group are self-taught hobby coders working on Linux.
Will ‘hobby languages’ be used in the professional environment later on?
Yes, they will. But this shifting doesn’t go fast. I investigated this question by comparing the years 2017 and 2019. For any particular language in 2017, the average hobby usage is 88.5%. In two years, this drops to 85.0%. The following histogram plots this difference for all investigated languages.
We can claim that languages tend to get used more by professionals later (t = 8.4, p < 0.01). But this analysis is limited to languages that are already popular, and hence does not consider its early years.
Further reading
The analysis used for this blogpost is available on Github.
If you want to view more results from the StackOverflow survey, you can read their summary. And feel free to discuss your findings in the comments.
