Hacks Tech Life

Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2016

TIOBE’s latest report assesses the popularity of programming languages using the number of skilled engineers and search engine rankings. The results:

1. Java

2. C

3. C++

4. C#

5. Python

6. PHP

7. VisualBasic.NET

8. JavaScript

9. Assembly Language

10.Ruby

11.Perl

12.Delphi

13.VisualBasic

14.Swift

15.MATLAB

16.Pascal

17.Groovy

18.Objective-C

19.R

20.PL/SQL

TIOBE states their chart is not an indicator of suitability or the number of lines written. Some languages rise because they’re still used and are relatively older than others. There are a few surprises: is VisualBasic still popular? It’s rarely used by professional developers, but it could be that many people use it for simple ad-hoc applications. That said, I don’t know of anyone who’s used assembly language for many, many years?

DevPost Student Hackers Report, January 2016

The DevPost report analyzes the work of 13,281 students participating on almost 10,000 projects during the 2014-2015 academic year. The results show technologies used, although it’s intermingled with programming languages:

1. HTML/CSS

2. JavaScript

3. Python

4. Java

5. C/C++

6. PHP

7. Objective-C

8. C#

9. Swift

10.JSON

11.Ruby

12.XML

13.Ajax

14.Shell

15.Processing

16.Lua

17.CoffeeScript

18.Go

19.MATLAB

20.OpenGL

The results mostly highlight what students are working on in their spare time. The projects tend to be dominated by native apps, embedded micro-controllers and wearables, which can be fairly niche technologies in the business world. In addition, these are languages the students wanted to use. Whether they were viable or pleasurable is another matter!