Tech trends
With every passing year, tech is changing faster than before. And it’s becoming a very competitive marketplace for the current and immerging technologies. This competition has given users and businesses high-performing and efficient software/apps, cryptocurrencies, awesome video games, and of course the Metaverse. The pandemic has also shifted the tech industry quite a lot. With the changing tech, landscape let’s see where the tech is headed for the future. Google Trends (GT) and tech surveys like StackOverflow(SO) survey 2022 provide a cool way to visualize these trends.
Programming Languages
Below are the 10 most popular languages according to SO. The preferences remain quite similar when you see which languages are more popular for learning to code.
Let’s now check out a few of them in detail and see according to current trends what seems to be their ultimate fate.
JavaScript
JS is an object-oriented, declarative, prototype-based, single-threaded, dynamic language. Because of its interpreted, lightweight, and just-in-time complication, for the past 10 years, it has been the most popular language. It's also one of the core technologies of the world wide web.
- Release: 1995
- Developer: Brendan Eich at Netscape
Node.js and React.js are by far the most popular JS frameworks. Angular on the other hand was popular but got a hard hit when it went from AngularJS to Angular(2+).
Enterprises with large apps probably found it difficult to continue with the uncertainty surrounding Angular. Around the same time, React and Veu provided more stable options and thus gained popularity with their lightweight and modern UI features. It is also faster and smoother to move existing apps to these frameworks with shallow learning curves. It's highly probable that these frameworks will keep being in the spotlight for web development. They are also very popular among people learning to code.
Python
Python is a dynamically typed general-purpose language. It supports multiple programming paradigms like object-oriented and functional programming. In recent years with the rise of AI/ML python has seen an increase in popularity. Because of its simplicity, platform independence, and robustness Python has become the go-to language for ML.
- Release: 1991
- Developer: Python software foundation
According to the SO survey, people learning to code are more likely to start with python. Current tech trends are in favor of Python seems like it has a bright future ahead, especially with the rise of AI/ML and data science.
Java
Java is a general-purpose object-oriented programming language with intention of writing ones and running everywhere. After its first release, its versatility made it popular with cross-platform application development. These features and the rise of the internet skyrocketed Java’s popularity. But in recent years, with the rise of new programming languages, Google dropping it for Android, and unpopularity for AI/ML, little by little Java is seeing a decline in popularity.
- Release: 1995
- Developer: Oracle
Java has enjoyed a good amount of time being one of the most popular programming languages. It still makes up the top 10 on the SO survey. Many enterprise applications are still powered by Java and spring. So I don’t think Java will be wiped out anytime soon. Even now, it’s still popular that GT uses it as an example on the Trends help page.
For Java lovers or haters here is a great article detailing Java’s popularity and perceivable future in more detail.
Kotlin
Kotlin is a modern concise, multiplatform general-purpose language designed to be fully interpolated with Java and other languages. It’s compatible with the Java ecosystem mainly targeting the JVM frameworks and libraries. After Google’s announcement in May 2019 to make Kotlin the preferred language for Android, it gained popularity in the native mobile app market. With Android on its side, Kotlin seems to be having a bright future ahead.
- Release: 2011
- Developer: JetBrains
For now, it stands 15th on the SO survey but sure enough, it’s expected to climb the charts in the coming years.
GraphQL
GraphQL is a query and manipulation language for developing APIs. It has been gaining popularity since 2008. The limited data usage on mobile networks definitely puts it on top of the existing API models like REST. Over the years, many companies are adopting it like Instagram, Twitter, Github, etc. With its new integration in spring-boot starters, seems like its popularity will continue to rise in the coming years.
- Release: 2012
- Developer: Facebook
GraphQL isn’t in the SO survey but I found this landscape that is cool to visualize how it’s evolving and its market value. GraphQL community also publishes annual reports which are interesting if you want to give it a try.
Frameworks/Tools
Git
With current trends, it’s very clear git is the most popular version control system. Git’s ease of collaboration, speed, distributed version control system, and making hosting free for open source projects made it so popular overtaking SVN. In short, its popularity is likely to follow the current trajectory in the coming years.
Spring
It’s one of the most famous open-source Java application frameworks. It’s flexible, fast, and has good community support. Over the years it has become so popular in the java world that if you are a java developer people already assume you know spring. In the past few years with the rise of other programming languages and frameworks like NodeJs and Django spring might see some changes in its popularity. But for now, it remains in the Java world’s limelight.
- Release: 2002
- Developer: VMWare
It still makes up the top 5 most popular frameworks and libraries according to SO 2022 survey.
Docker
Docker, an open-source project, is a software platform for building applications based on containers. Its simplicity and capabilities to run your application on the cloud have made its popularity skyrocket in recent years.
- Release: 2013
- Developer: Docker, Inc
With the rise of containerization in the cloud, Docker's popularity will continue to increase in the coming years.
Databases
No application is complete without a database. It helps applications store, access, and manipulate data. There are different types of DBs with their respective query languages. With modest hardware requirements, speed, and support for almost all types of applications Mysql is very popular.
But as the trends show over the past few years other types of DBs are gaining popularity like MongoDB, Redis, and elastic search. Which are also popular among the new developers. So seems like these may snatch away a little bit of MySQL spotlight in the coming years.
Cloud Platforms
The concept of cloud computing has excited since the 1990s but it started to gain much popularity in the 2000s. Till 2010 Vmware stood as the top dog in cloud and server virtualization. But in recent years it’s lost its top spot to AWS and Azure. AWS is so popular because of its low-cost, wide range of tools, and customizable options. It helps businesses to achieve a low-cost migration of their current infrastructure to AWS.
With Vmware and AWS’s partnership, the rise of containerization, and orchestration the cloud seems to be headed toward a hybrid market.
Popular IDEs
Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular IDE with its lightweight, solid less complex features, robustness, extensible architecture, and the rise of web development.
Intellij Idea developed by JetBrains same company behind the Android studio is one of the most popular IDE for Java and Kotlin developers. They also provide PyCharm of python. With the rise of android and support for various languages(limited features on community version)/frameworks, and modern intelligent design its popularity is expected to rise.
After the release of Intellj’s community version Eclipse has been falling in popularity. For text editors, with high performance and slick UI Sublime text, Notepad++ has been gaining popularity. Vim on the other is popular for its speed and high configurability. I think the future of IDEs is proportional to the programming language/frameworks they support. IDEs stability, performance, and ease of use also affect how long they’ll survive.
Sync Tools
As we all know since the beginning of the pandemic Zoom became super popular because of its user-friendliness, better performance, and ease of use. I added Discord because even though companies don't use it for various reasons. It already has a big audience.
I have used all of them and I think even though they have good features to choose from. If you have ever worked with multiple teams, you know convincing all of them to use the same tool still remains complicated. Well according to GT and SO survey Zoom, Teams are the clear winners for now.
Summary
With all this data the big question is where the tech is headed? If we look at the popular techs and frameworks in each category it looks like the tech is headed towards building faster, low-cost, lightweight, easily scalable, automated, and intelligent (AI/ML) software. So going forward technologies that support these features are more likely to grow in the market and others might slowly decline. That’s what I think, and what about you guys where do you think the tech is headed?
