Programming languages have made life easier for everyone. There are about 600-700 programming languages out there and there is always a doubtfulness in choosing the best programming language for all of us. Lots of questions will arise in your mind such as
- Which programming language should I learn to master in my career?
- Which programming language will continue to be in demand in 2024 and beyond?
- Whether the chosen language is tough to learn?
- Which programming language will be paid higher in the upcoming days?
If knowledge is not put into practice, it does not benefit one
Learning programming languages could be the greatest asset in your career since it improves your skillsets. It's always wise choosing the best and most popular programming language since it would be more effective.
Places To Identify Top Programming Languages
Here I'm gonna discuss key metrics that should be considered while you are looking for most popular languages in 2021. Always have a look at top programming languages ranking websites while choosing them.
GitHub
Github is the largest code hosting platform with millions of users and there are around 57 millions of repositories. With the analysis of how languages are used in GitHub, it's feasible to understand which languages are used popularly among the developers.
The statistics are updated in a quarterly basis and the graphical chart shows the top 50 languages with top ranking and percentage that are calculated with the data available in the GitHub archive dataset.
The above chart represents the most popular languages with statistical reports. According to GitHub, Python and JavaScript are the two most popular language in 2023.
TIOBE
TIOBE programming community index evaluates the top programming languages based on the number of search engine results for queries containing the name of the language. It uses nearly 25 search engines to calculate the index and lists the top-notch programming languages world-wide.
The above tabulation helps you in identifying the popular language of 2020. With the statistical report, you can select and deselect the most trending language
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow is basically a question and answer site developed for programmers. This site is about getting answers and the most relevant answers will be upvoted and ascend to the top so that the researchers could easily find the solution. Stack Overflow surveyed over 65000 users about the programming languages they use and using those responses they have listed the most popular programming languages.
The above histogram shows the top-most programming languages that had been gathered from all the users and the below bar graph represents the most popular programming languages that had been gathered from all the developers to determine what are all the languages that are used most in the organizations.
Top-Notch Programming Languages
I have listed the most popular languages with all the stats from renowned programming languages ranking websites like GitHub, TIOBE, Google Trends etc.
Python
Python is the scripting language developed by Guido van Rossum. It is an open-source, interpreted, high-level programming language with extensive community development and support modules with a vast collection of libraries. It is dynamically typed and garbage collected. Its main aim is to help developers write clear, simple and logical code for small and large-scale organizations. It is a multi-paradigm programming language.
There are two main reasons why python becomes more popular - It can handle a big range of tasks and is a beginner-friendly language. It can automate a series of tasks which make it more efficient. With the syntax that is more similar to English, makes it easy to understand, easy to learn and easy to use and implement. For example,
You can simply print a hello world in a single line using the print statement whereas other programming languages like Java includes 3-4 lines of code.
There are about 1,637 Python user groups worldwide in almost 191 cities, 37 countries and over 860,333 members.
Usage Scenarios
- Web and Game development
- Data Science
- Data Analytics
- Scientific and Numeric Applications
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
- Web Scraping Applications
- Enterprise Applications
JavaScript
It is a light-weight, object-oriented language and is better known as scripting language which is used to create dynamic web page content. It is the most popular languages in developing websites which were created by Brendan Eich within a short span of time. It enhances web pages and applications to offer a user-friendly experience.
It is the programming language which lets you design the most complex and beautiful web application and websites. It is an object-based scripting language which supports polymorphism, encapsulation and inheritance. This is one of the most popular languages since it brings a great change in the market.
It has a wide variety of frameworks and is easy to learn and implement. It is platform independent and executes the code very fast since it doesn't depend on any responses from server-side.
People who are curious in developing websites must learn Javascript and it is also a quite useful skill in today's job market. It has become the most essential technology in web development along with HTML and CSS.
Usage Scenarios
- Web Development
- Backend Development
- Mobile App Development
- Serverless Computing
- Browser Game Development
Java
Java is one of the most popular languages used in developing server-side applications. More than 12 Million programmers use Java worldwide. It was first developed by James Gosling and his team to develop applications in a simpler way that supports multi-threading and since C++ was very hard to learn and implement and also it was platform dependent.
Java is called the first platform-independent language. Java Virtual Machine (JVM) recognizes the platform it is on and converts the bytecodes into native machine code.
Recently Java has lost most of its markets since the development of highly developer-friendly modern languages such as Python, JS, Swift, Scala, Go etc. But according to statistics, it is the number one programming languages in the job market.
Usage Scenarios
- Enterprise Application Development
- Android App Development
- Developing self-driving cars
- Big Data analysis
- Web Development
C#
C# is a strongly typed object-oriented programming language which is used to perform a wide range of backend tasks. It is one of the strong programming languages for the .NET framework. It was specifically developed at building Windows desktop applications and games. It is fast and open-source, a multi-paradigm programming language widely used on Windows platform. It is also platform-independent, like Java which runs on any platforms. People who are interested in VR development should consider learning C#. It is popularly used in building 2D and 3D video games.
Usage Scenarios
- Server-Side programming
- App development
- Web Development
- Game Development
- Software for Windows Platform
GO
Go is also known as Golang and was first developed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. in 2007 for APIs and web applications. It can handle multicore and networked systems and was specifically developed for organizations who build large projects. Big organizations such as American Express, Netflix, Uber etc. uses Golang to enhance their software. Since it is open source and is available in GitHub anyone can contribute, propose new features and fix bugs.
Unlike Python, Golang has statically typed programming language since you need to declare variables, function arguments at compile time. It also provides Communicating sequential processes (CSP) based message-passing concurrency through Goroutine (lightweight Green thread) and Channel.
Usage Scenarios
- Used to create fast and exquisite CLI.
- Supports SRE and DevOps
- Cryptocurrency - Used for the Bitcoin Lightning Network and Ethereum blockchain.
- Serverless Computing
- Cloud-Native Development
C and C++
Almost all the operating systems, file systems etc. were developed using C/C++ languages. It was the most commonly used languages in the early days and is extremely fast and stable. C is a procedural programming language whereas C++ is both procedural and object-oriented language. The main advantage of learning C/C++ is that it deepens the understanding of how programming works on a whole this helps you in learning new languages with greater ease.
Usage Scenarios of C and C++
- Used in developing Operating Systems
- Embedded Systems
- Graphical User Interface
- Compiler Design
- Database software such as MySQL was built using C
- Banking applications
R
R is an open-source language developed Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka which runs seamlessly on Windows, Linux and MAC operating systems. It is the most commonly used for Data Analysis and Machine Learning and also used in statistical computing and graphics. It is machine-independent and supports the cross-platform operation and as a result, it can be used on the different operating system.
It has excellent frameworks and built-in libraries which is mostly used in developing Machine Learning algorithms. Some of the major organizations that use R language are Facebook, Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, Mozilla etc.
Usage Scenarios
- Finance
- E-commerce
- Social Media
- Banking
- Manufacturing
- HealthCare
Ruby
Ruby is an Object-Oriented Scripting language which is commonly used for web development and is developed by Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto. It is the dynamically-typed, high-level, multiple-paradigm programming language. It is implemented in C and offers garbage collection. It is used by some of the largest organizations like Twitter, GitHub, Airbnb.
Usage Scenarios
- Web Scraping Crawling
- Static Website Generators
- Automation, Backup & DevOps tools
- Full-Stack Web Development
Conclusion
With the above post, you can choose the best and the most popular programming language that fits your need. There are hundreds of programming languages and I have shortlisted a few with the help of the great resource and I hope you can choose the best one out of it and start gaining knowledge. Almost every programmer would be in eager to learn new technologies and languages. Learning helps you in gaining knowledge and to get good at something you learn you have to practice and practicing what you are learning makes your skillset more efficient.
