Future-proof your IT career!
It's now a common saying in today's tech-driven world, every company is a technology company. And in the middle of these technology innovations are the developers and the programming languages they use. It is very important for developers to know what are the latest software development trends and what programming languages they should prioritize to learn and adapt to. Fortunately, industry professionals have been closely monitoring and the report shared by developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk can hopefully help in with your decision.
RedMonk’s first quarter 2018 ranking was based on the pull requests in GitHub, as well as an approximate count of how many times a language is tagged on developer knowledge-sharing site Stack Overflow. RedMonk collated data from both sites starting September 2012 to January 2018. The top 10 programming languages based on the report are:
- JavaScript
- Java
- Python
- PHP
- C#
- C++
- CSS
- Ruby
- C
- Swift
The list above have been consistently in the top 10 list with the exception of Swift rising to replace Objective-C. which was at #10 last year. Comparing the above list with TIOBE’s top programming language index for April 2018 would show that many of the same top 10 languages but in a different order.
These and other popularity rankings are meant to help developers see which skills they should be developing. However, technology and the computing industry is changing so much that knowing the latest and trending programming language isn’t enough. To be a successful software developer, you have to learn multiple programming languages and multiple frameworks. So if you want to catch the attention of potential employers, widen skills and start learning a new programming language!
By Mike Javate, Senior Consultant and Practice Head for Information & Communications Technology