JavaScript is the most common language used by professional developers, according to a survey from many developers’ go-to community for solving programming problems, Stack Overflow.
Of the 53,000 respondents who answered this part of Stack Overflow’s annual survey, 68 per cent said they had done extensive dev work in JavaScript over the past year.
In second place was HTML/CSS which 55 per cent said they had worked with, followed by database management language SQL (53 per cent), Python (44 per cent), and TypeScript (40 per cent).
There was only a slight difference between professional developers and the 6,200 respondents who said they were learning to code. New developers are also heavily invested in HTML/CSS (63 per cent), JavaScript (60 per cent), and Python (58 per cent) but are picking them up at nearly identical rates.
Top 10 languages professional developers use
- JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- SQL
- Python
- TypeScript
- Java
- C#
- Bash/Shell
- PHP
- C++
The prominence of JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and SQL isn’t particularly surprising given 47 per cent of Stack Overflow’s respondents said they were full-stack developers.
The most loved coding language is Rust with 87 per cent of Rust developers saying they wanted to keep using it.
Rust has been atop the most loved list for seven straight years of the Stack Overflow survey, despite only nine per cent of professional developers having used it extensively in the last year.
Python and Rust are tied as the most wanted languages for developers who aren’t using the language but would like to start developing it; 18 per cent of respondents said they wanted to learn Rust and Python, and 17 per cent said they were interested in TypeScript.
The most dreaded language is MATLAB, which just 19 per cent of people said they wanted to keep working with.
COBOL came in a close second with only 20 per cent of its developers keen to keep using the 63-year-old business language.
Coding in the cloud
For the first time, Stack Overflow asked if its community had cloud infrastructure engineers which nine per cent of people said they were.
By far the most common cloud platform for professional developers was Amazon Web Service (AWS) which 55 per cent of developers said they had done extensive development work in over the last year.
Microsoft Azure (30 per cent) and Google Cloud (26 per cent) were the next most common.
It’s a different story for people learning to code, however, with one of the earliest cloud platforms Heroku (35 per cent) being the most popular for new developers, followed closely by Firebase (30 per cent).
AWS (24 per cent) comes in fourth for people learning to code in the cloud with Azure (16 per cent) rounding out the top five.
