The question of which programming language to begin to study, perhaps, the most important for each beginner. If you make a mistake with the choice, you can spend years in vain! If you read the rating of the professions of the Internet, then you know what awaits us ahead with earnings.
If you choose the right main stack, you can guess with both salary and career. Next, let’s talk about the most promising areas in coding and trends for the coming years.
Programming language ranking
In the IT world, there is a long-accepted evaluation standard:
The TIOBE index is a score given to each programming language in a popularity rating system.
Here is the dynamics of the popularity of languages in recent years:
Judging by the latest data, the TIOBE index put such a rating for the top ten programming languages:
| 1 | С |
| 2 | Java |
| 3 | Python |
| 4 | C++ |
| 5 | C# |
| 6 | Visual Basic |
| 7 | JavaScript |
| 8 | Assembly |
| 9 | PHP |
| 10 | SQL |
No matter how individual preferences change, from year to year, the leadership of C along with Python and Java has been almost unchanged for the past 20 years. It turns out that choosing any of these languages, you can not miscalculate with a high probability.
Calculation methodology
The authors of the project do not hide the fact that the TIOBE index is calculated using a simple method – all requests are parsed with a mention of the programming language from search engines and top portals:
- YouTube
- Bing
- Wikipedia
- Yahoo!
- Amazon
- Baidu
after which the rating of the most mentioned language programming is built:
Everything is very simple.
What language to learn today
The TIOBE index is not the ultimate truth – it should not be considered a ranking by the amount of code written in a particular language. Not at all. This ranking shows us which language is the most popular in the internet world at the moment.
There is another index of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE), which takes into account data from sources on finding a job in the IT field on such resources:
- GitHub
- StackOverflow
Here is their ranking of programming languages:
Here the picture is similar, at least in the first three places, but further down the rating, discoveries are already beginning.
If you have some local preferences or professional guidelines, then the choice of a programming language for you may have a different logic.
For example, if you want to work for the largest Google corporation, then you should proceed from this:
- the search engine front-end is written in C and C++, and the crawlers are written in Python, and then rewritten in C++
If you are attracted to another Facebook giant:
- then when creating it, most of the code is in C++ and PHP
For a web programmer, the demand for programming languages is different:
- most sites run on WordPress, which uses PHP and JavaScript
Where language is used
Where is the C language used:
- Operating system kernel (Windows, Linux, Android, etc.)
- Drivers and software for hardware
Where Java is used:
- servers
- android apps
Where Python is used:
- server software
- application software
- games
What lies ahead for code development
It doesn’t matter what language you use for coding, there are certain trends in the future, which can be traced already now. Here’s what everyone who plans to work as programmers should pay attention to:
- Mobile development rules (the desktop environment is leaving, desktop complex programs are leaving after it)
- The code becomes more convenient and readable
- Need cross-platform
To make a decision, the final word is yours, but whatever programming language you choose, it already makes you an order of magnitude cooler than the rest of the mass of users!