Wednesday 25 September 2013

Java, C, C++ still rule

Lets start by admitting that there is no "industry standard" ranking mechanism for popularity of programming languages in the world.

There are however many ways in which people do surveys, analyse data from different sources like job offerings, training courses, searches on internet and technology sites etc. that help us conclude which programming languages are taking the top mindshare at the moment.

There are three articles that I'm going to link to at the end of this post. All three of them have based their ranking on different ways of measuring the programming language popularity. However, if we combine the results from these three and try to make a conclusion we will find that the top 3 most popular programming languages today are:

  1. Java
  2. C
  3. C++
They appear among the top 5 in almost any similar survey or data analysis and it is safe to arrive at our conclusion.

There are other's that come close in popularity and usage - namely Objective-C, PHP and C#.

What does that mean for the young IT graduates?

It means that if you focus on building good programming skills using the popular 3 languages, you will have a higher probability of finding the right jobs sooner. 

There are of course other skills that will go along with it. Databases is one.
Databases are used on almost all business applications and even if you learn the programming languages, you may not be able to use them much unless you learn how to interact with and use databases. So learning about databases and SQL is important too.

Three sources that have inspired this blog post are:
  1. TIOBE Programming Community Index for September 2013
  2. InfoWorld.com
  3. Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2013

So buckle up and build your skills if you want a rewarding career as an IT Engineer.

1 comment:

  1. I support the above view as long as Java is concerned. Now a days it is sitting at the root of all major frameworks like Spring, Struts, Hibernate and Apache Axis. In Most of the mobile apps development work is supported by Java because of its platform independence nature.
    But when I look at C and C++, these two languages are now limited to certain areas. I do not see much demand in market except embedded design which too is limited.
    What I believe is: as a programmer there is no specific programming language which will boost your career. Instead the more you know, the better you will be in the market.

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