Top Programming Languages to Use

According to Wikipedia, there are almost 700 programming languages in the world and most likely you have never heard about some of them. As a custom software development company with a rich stack of technologies and 20+ years of experience, we know which one to choose for delivering the best possible solution. In this blog post, we want to highlight the top programming languages to use in 2020.

The Most Learned Languages

To see the popularity of languages among beginners and those who continue to expand personal technology stack, let us take a look at the PYPL index for February 2020. PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Languages) shows how often people search for language tutorials and learning courses in Google.

As we see, Python is the most learned language at the moment followed by all the top languages you have definitely heard of. Compared to the previous year, only two languages show the growth of popularity: Python (+4.1%) and JavaScript (+0.1%). All the other mentioned languages lose their positions: Java (-1.8%), C# (-0.1%), PHP (-1%), and C/C++ (-0.2%).
The ‘Other languages’ section contains 22 languages with notably smaller percentages of being searched for. However, there are two languages demonstrating significant popularity growth: Kotlin (+4 positions) and Dart (+7 positions). We believe they will continue to attract more attention and should be considered for learning.

The Most Utilized Languages

Now let us take a look at the languages that are actively used for software development. For that purpose, we will use GitHub’s statistics showing the popularity of languages over the past 5 years by repository contributors.

Being the most popular for learning and outranking Java, Python is only the second top language. JavaScript remains the undisputed champion year after year and we bet it will continue to stay number one.

We also want to mention the use of the languages that are not as popular as mentioned above yet demonstrating considerable growth of popularity compared to the previous year. Here are the 5 languages we want to highlight:

With such enormous growth, these languages are worth attention from both new-learners and experienced software developers.

One more source we want to pay attention to — the TIOBE index. It is updated every month and shows the popularity of programming languages based on the number of learning courses, skilled developers, and other related data provided by top search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Youtube, etc.) Here is the table representing the top 10 languages in February 2020 as well as their rating in February 2019 — to see the dynamics:

Here we see a different picture even though the most well-known languages are still there: Java, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Python, and PHP. Swift turns out to be the most fast-developing in terms of popularity. It can be referred to as ‘Objective-C killer’ as it was released by Apple to replace Objective-C (and its popularity has actually decreased — it can be seen in the first table). Swift is easy to learn due to simple syntax and mainly used for developing apps for iOS and Mac platforms.

Top 10 Languages to Use in 2020

Keeping all the mentioned information in mind and combining it with our 20+ years of experience in software development, we want to highlight the top 10 programming languages.

#1 JavaScript

The number one language to be utilized (to keep being utilized), JavaScript is a high-level, multi-paradigm dynamic programming language that will remain the most popular in the world for many more years. Mainly it is used for developing interactive and feature-rich web applications but can also be utilized for creating other software that runs anywhere: servers, browsers, mobile devices, micro-controllers, etc.

#2 Python

Being the most learned at the moment, Python will soon increase its utilization popularity as well. Due to elegant and simple syntax, it is considered to be the easiest language to learn and is used for teaching programming. It is widely used for machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), data science as well as for mathematics, statistics, computational science. Being both simple and powerful, Python allows streamlining the development process of robust applications: web or mobile.

#3 Java

Despite similar names, Java has little in common with JavaScript. It is an object-oriented, interpreted programming language that was the first one allowing you to write the code once and run it anywhere. This language can be used for the development of applications of all sizes both web and mobile as well as for developing enterprise-level applications and working with Big Data.

#4 PHP

Having a large open-source community and being widely used by the industry giants like Facebook or WordPress, PHP remains on-demand even though its