Programming Languages To Watch In 2018

Whether you’re a computer science student, software engineer or just a computer enthusiast, you will be faced with the common dilemma of choosing which programming language to learn first.

There are several causes for this dilemma, but in most cases, people find themselves torn between two choices; whether to choose passion over money or money over passion.

If your motive is money-driven, I would suggest you go with the market forces of supply and demand. If your motives are purely passion-driven then choose any language that pleases you.

And since most people tend to be driven by the money motive when choosing their career path these days, I suggest you should learn a programming language based on market forces of supply and demand and economic indicators.

There are many resources to get economic indicators; to help you choose any undertaking or career path, including programming languages. You want to choose a career path that gives you the greatest advantage in the market.

Indeed.com Top most in-demand programming languages based on job openings as at December 2017

TOP 10 ChallengeRocket.com ranking of projected earnings in 2017 by programming language:

GitHub.com Top programming languages by most pull requests for 2017

Another good indicator is the TIOBE Programming Community index. This indicator calculates the popularity of programming languages based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The index uses popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu to calculate the ratings. The index is updated monthly.

Source: TIOBE - The Software Quality Company

Based on a combination of demand/supply, popularity and pull requests you could start by learning Java, followed by Python, C# and JavaScript in that order. You could then graduate to other more difficult languages such as C/C++, Go, Swift, PHP etc., in no particular order.

#1 - Java

Java was invented at Sun Microsystems in 1995 by James Gosling Jr. It is a general-purpose programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. The Java design philosophy is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation.

Java is recommended as the first language for teaching or learning Object-Oriented Programming and is suitable for developing Android applications.

Java is currently the No #1 most popular programming language on the TIOBE Index. It should be noted that as the Internet continues to evolve, Java is gradually losing popularity to emerging languages such as Python and JavaScript as the preferred tools for developing the web.

#2 - C/C++

C (pronounced as “See”) is a powerful, low-level, compact procedural programming language originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. Owing to its low-level nature, C is one of the fastest programming languages and is used for building embedded systems, device drivers and other mission-critical CPU-specific applications.

C++ (pronounced as “See plus-plus”), was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs in 1979 as an extension of the C programming language. C++ is arguably one of the fastest and most successful object-oriented programming languages. C++ is popularly used for systems programming, embedded systems and other mission-critical applications.

C/C++ programmers are still in high demand especially in the technology firms such as Google and Microsoft. It is suitable for creating web browsers and compilers. Therefore, C/C++ will continue to earn a wide scope in 2018 and beyond.

Both C and C++ occupy the number #2 and #3 position respectively on the TIOBE Index.

#3 - Python

Python is a powerful, high-level programming language that supports multiple paradigms such as object-oriented, imperative, functional and procedural programming.

Python is suitable for building web applications, games development, Data Science, AI and Machine Learning. Some large companies using Python include: Google (YouTube), Facebook (Tornado), Dropbox, Yahoo, NASA, IBM, Mozilla and Quora.

Python is easy to learn and is recommended by many universities for teaching programming as the first language.

Python is currently the 4th most popular programming language on the TIOBE Index. With the emergence of big data, AI and other technologies, Python is gradually gaining popularity over Java as the language of choice.

#4 - C#

Pronounced as “C-Sharp”, C# is a general-purpose, type-safe, object-oriented programming language developed at Microsoft in 2001. The goal of the language is programmer productivity. To this end, the language balances simplicity, expressiveness, and performance. The chief architect of the language since its first version is Anders Hejlsberg (creator of Turbo Pascal and architect of Delphi).

The C# language is platform-neutral, but it was written to work well with the Microsoft .NET Framework.

C# is currently the 5th most popular programming language on the TIOBE Index. C# will continue to dominate the Microsoft Windows environment in 2018 and for the foreseeable future.

#5 - PHP

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a powerful server-side programming language originally invented by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It supports imperative, functional, procedural, reflective and  object-oriented programming paradigms and a host of major databases including MySQL, Postgre SQL and MariaDB.

From the onset, PHP was originally designed to create dynamic web content, and it is still best suited for that task. It can be embedded in HTML tags and other pieces of web-centric content. Language innovations such as the introduction of PHP7 and the Laravel PHP framework have seen PHP take a quantum leap.

PHP now powers 83.3% of the entire web according to W3Techs.com, including popular websites, social networks and content management systems (CMS) like Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, OpenCart and PrestaShop among many others…

PHP is currently the 7th most popular programming language on the TIOBE Index. The popularity of PHP on the TIOBE index has dropped slightly due to the emergence of other languages such as Python and JavaScript.

#6 - JavaScript

JavaScript is one of the three core technologies of World Wide Web content engineering alongside HTML and CSS. Traditionally, JavaScript is used to make web pages interactive and provide online programs, including video games on the front-end. The standard JavaScript specification (ECMAScript 2017) is supported by almost all browsers.

With the introduction of Node.js and other JavaScript-centric frameworks and tools such as React.js, Vue.js, Backbone.js and MongoDB, JavaScript is gradually gaining popularity as the preferred technology for building the web, thanks to Node’s non-blocking open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment for executing server-side JavaScript code.

Node.js is built on chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. V8 has ability to compile and execute JavaScript at lightning fast speed, because it compiles JavaScript into a native machine code, instead of interpreting it or executing it as bytecode.

JavaScript is currently the 8th most popular programming language on the TIOBE Index.

Conclusion:

Based the above survey and a combination of factors such as demand/supply and popularity pull requests, Java continues to have the widest scope in 2018 and beyond, followed by Python, C#, JavaScript, Ruby and PHP in that order. Java will gain a lot of traction especially in Android development as the demand for mobile apps continues to increase.

JavaScript appears to be gaining momentum rapidly as Node.js continues to be implemented in new development projects. However, the adoption has been relatively slow compared to other languages like Python, although the demand to learn JavaScript has increased sharply.

C/C++ will continue to hold a respectable position for the foreseeable future. Emerging languages such as Kotlin, Go, Objective-C, Swift and R will also continue to earn their space. Only time will tell.