Programming languages are the foundations of all the existing technology that we are surrounded with. Developers, tech enthusiasts, and others keep themselves updated with the latest programming languages to be abreast with the advancements happening within each of it. Popular survey websites such as TIOBE, Redmonk, StackOverflow, IEEE spectrum, etc. help people to know about the trending top programming languages and where their favorite language stands.
Out of these, the IEEE spectrum and StackOverflow showcase their ranking surveys annually. Whereas TIOBE does it every month and Redmonk does it semi-annually. From the two annual survey providers, Stack Overflow takes in surveys from 56,033 coders in 173 countries whereas IEEE spectrum’s survey synthesizes rankings from 10 sources including
The IEEE spectrum aggregates different kinds of statistical data with a view to generate the most reliable ranking. It also gives the most personalized ranking. The interactive interface allows readers to filter by search trends, job trends, or open source community trends. You can even modify the weighting of each dimension, enabling an extremely personalized ranking.
Of the five popular language ranking surveys and our own Packt’s Skill Up survey 2018, the top 10 programming languages for this year include,
Stack Overflow | Redmonk | TIOBE | IEEE Spectrum | Packt Skill Up Survey |
JavaScript | JavaScript | Java | Python | Java |
HTML | Java | C | C++ | JavaScript |
CSS | Python | C++ | C | Python |
SQL | PHP | Python | Java | C# |
Java | C# | Visual Basic | C# | SQL |
Bash/Shell | C++ | C# | PHP | C++ |
Python | CSS | PHP | R | C |
C# | Ruby | JavaScript | JavaScript | PHP |
PHP | C | SQL | Go | Swift |
C++ | Swift | Assembly | Assembly | Go |
The IEEE Spectrum 2018 survey included 47 programming languages ranging from the most widely adopted to the least. However, not all the programming languages were a part of this list. Current popular languages such as Kotlin, Dart, TypeScript, WebAssembly and some others were missing from the list.
As per some comments on the IEEE blog, IEEE uses the languages listed in Github. On Github, Visual basic is the common name used for both vb.net and Visual Basic.
Also, some languages present in the other surveys are not present in the IEEE survey. For instance, the TIOBE index has PL/SQL at the 20th position. However, the IEEE survey has not mentioned about it.
One more limitation it had was, it showed completely different results on different browsers, which Stephen Cass from IEEE spectrum said, “ I’d say it’s due to variations in how JQuery/JavaScript is implemented in the different browsers: under the hood, the TPL uses a lot of floating point math, so what you are seeing could be due to differences in precision/rounding, et cetera. Ultimately, I suspect the solution will be to calculate the rankings completely server-side: the underlying code for the TPL is five years old, so we were thinking of overhauling it anyway, and this certainly puts some weight behind that.”
Stephen further added, “I should add that we built the TPL primarily using Chrome, so our canonical version of the rankings is the one you see in that browser.”
Read more about the other programming languages by IEEE Spectrum in the IEEE blog post
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