With much of the world focused on a certain upcoming US election, there might never have been more focus on polls. But we all know that polls can be influenced by the questions pollsters choose to ask, or even skewed to arrive at the desired outcome.
When it comes to programming languages, this ZDNET article recently tried to make sense of the multiple competing popularity indexes and come up with their list of the most popular programming languages in 2024.
They started by taking a step back, asking questions like “What does popularity even mean?”, and “Is that even a language?”.
As with politics, the answer will depend on the motivation of the questioner, and the perspective of the questionee, e.g.:
- A student might want to know where the best programming jobs are, influencing their decision on which language to study.
- A developer embarking on a new project might prefer to use the language they consider the best technical fit for the job at hand.
- That same developer’s boss might be prepared to compromise on short-term efficiency if they see a risk down the track when it comes to finding skilled programmers familiar with a relatively obscure language.
That dilemma is reflected in the different methodologies used by publishers of a range of “language popularity indexes”, who might take into account things like:
- How often the language name is mentioned in web searches
- How many job advertisements mention the language
- The sales of books that teach or describe the language
- The number of existing lines of code written in the language
- The number of projects in repositories like GitHub
- The number of courses teaching the language, or students enrolled
ZDNET’s Poll of the Polls
When it comes to political polls, independent analysts often approach this issue by aggregating the results of multiple polls, sometimes applying weightings based on their perceived reliability. The results might look something like this chart from BBC News:
David Gewirtz of ZDNet decided to take a similar approach. He:
- Aggregated the results of nine prominent language popularity indexes
- Focused on languages that were listed in 5 or more of those indexes
- Weighted languages based on frequency of appearance, and rankings
Long-term readers of Orchid’s articles will know that we’ve taken an interest in this subject for years, often quoting sources like the Tiobe, IEEE Spectrum, or PYPL Indexes. Our articles have usually drawn attention to the rise in popularity of Python, the scripting language used by Orchid Extender.
We were curious to see what ZDNET came up with in their resulting ZDNET Index of Programming Language Popularity for 2024.
The result confirmed what we’ve been reporting for years, with Python coming in “top of the pops”, leading the cluster comprising Python, JavaScript, and Java, followed by the family C-based languages.
Postscript: "Your dream programming job demands Python"
David Gewirtz followed up the 31-Aug-2024 article referred to above with another, published by ZDNet on 11-Nov-2024, which did a deep dive into programming job listings. After describing his methodology and results, his conclusion was as follows:
The key takeaway from this research and our previous language popularity studies is to ensure you know Python.
(For more about how Orchid Systems has leveraged the power of Python, take a look at Extender Developer, or browse our Extender Marketplace for a small taste of the solutions we and our partners have managed to implement for Sage 300.)
