Author | Xin Xiaoliang
Produced by | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Recently, developer survey and analysis company SlashData released the 2022 "Developer Report" (Edit 23). The report found that JavaScript has 19.5 million developers worldwide and deserves to be the most popular programming language.
It is understood that SlashData's survey comes from more than 26,000 developers in 163 countries and regions around the world. Compared with TIOBE, Redmonk, etc., it can be easier to see the popularity of programming languages.
JavaScript remains the largest language community
Report shows that JavaScript has become the most popular programming language for the 11th consecutive time, with more than 19.5 million developers using it worldwide. It is worth noting that the size of the JavaScript community has also been growing continuously in the past few years.
Between the third quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of 2022, about 7.3 million developers joined the Javascript community, a 59% increase, which is also the fastest growing of any programming language. Not only are new developers seeing it as an attractive entry-level language, but existing developers also use JavaScript to expand their skill sets. Reports show that JavaScript is popular across all areas, with at least one-quarter of developers using it in each area.
Data Science and Machine Learning Help Python Rise
In 2020, Python surpassed Java to become the second most widely used programming language, and now has nearly 17 million developers in its community. Python also continues to show strong growth momentum, with a net increase of about 8 million developers over the past two years.
The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a major factor in Python's growing popularity. From this perspective, about 63% of machine learning developers and data scientists report using Python themselves. By comparison, less than 15% use R language (another language that is often associated with data science).
is a programming veteran, and Java has grown strongly. PHP has gradually withdrawn from
Java As one of the most important common languages in the programming world, it has existed for more than 20 years. Although the number of users has been surpassed by Python, it continues to grow strongly. In the past two years, Java's community has nearly doubled, from 8.3 million to 16.5 million. Last year alone, Java added 6.3 million developers, the largest growth in all language communities.
This survey data shows that Java's growth is not only supported by ordinary developers (i.e. backend and mobile development), but also has increased adoption in AR/VR projects, which may be due to the popularity of Android as the AV/VR platform and Java as the cornerstone of the Android application ecosystem.
Other mainstream programming languages such as C/C++, C# and PHP grew by 12.3 million, 10.6 million and 8.9 million respectively, of which PHP's growth rate was the slowest of all languages, with only 160 new developers added last year. As a common choice for server and web developers, PHP is declining in popularity, especially among web developers, which has gone from being the second largest popular language after JavaScript in the third quarter of 2021 to the fourth largest popular language in the third quarter of 2022, surpassed by Python and Java.
In addition, C and C++ are still the core languages for embedded and IoT projects, suitable for both device-level coding, application-level coding, and mobile and desktop development, which have attracted 17.7 million and 15.6 million developers respectively. C#, on the other hand, has been popular in many different areas of software development, especially among desktop and game developers. Last year, C/C++ added 4.3 million net new developers, while C# added 2.8 million during the same period.
Last but not least, in the IoT, gaming and AR/VR, developers are looking for new programming languages to replace C and C++, such as the niche Lua, which has also seen good growth recently.
Rust and Kotlin's popularity continues to rise
Many well-known programming language selection agencies regard Rust and Kotlin as new languages that have been popular in the past two years, and SlashData is no exception. This survey also shows that these two language communities are growing rapidly. Over the past two years, Rust has more than tripled in size, from 800,000 developers in the third quarter of 2020 to 2.8 million in the third quarter of 2022. Rust has added 700,000 developers in the last six months alone, and there has been a trend that has surpassed Objective-C to become the 11th largest language community. Rust has formed a strong community of developers, a group of developers that care more about performance, memory security and security, so it is increasingly used in IoT software projects, as well as desktop and game development, and Rust is favored for its ability to build fast and scalable projects.
Kotlin has also seen significant growth in the past two years, more than doubled from 2.3 million in the third quarter of 2020 to 6.1 million in the third quarter of 2022. Therefore, it rose from the ninth largest language community to the seventh largest language community during this period, surpassing Swiftml3 and those using visual development tools. This increase is largely due to Google's decision to make Kotlin the preferred language for Android development in 2019. Currently 1/5 of mobile developers use Kotlin and is the second most popular language for mobile development, second only to Java. Although Google prefers Kotlin, Java's historical accumulation shows that it is still the most popular language for mobile development. In addition, more and more developers in mobile development use the Flutter framework, and 13% of mobile developers currently use the Google language.
Other language situation
Swift currently has 4.2 million developers, and is the default development language for all Apple platforms. The Apple application ecosystem is gradually phased out Objective-C. However, Objective-Ch still maintains its position among IoT developers, with more and more people adopting code on the device, including AR/VR developers, which has led to a similar increase in the number of Swift and Objective-C developers over the past two years, at 1.8 million and 1.6 million respectively. So, it's too early for Swift to completely replace Objective-C.
Other more niche languages such as Go, Ruby, Dart and Lua are still much smaller, with less than 4 million active developers per person. Go and Ruby are important languages in back-end development, but Go has grown faster, increasing more than twice as many developers as Ruby in the past two years, with 2.3 million and 1 million new developers respectively. This is probably due to the faster development cycle it provides, although it is a compiled language.
https://slashdata-website-cms.s3.amazonaws.com/sample_reports/dsIe6JlZge_KsHWt.pdf
