Software development is one of the fields of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) with the greatest demand for professionals. This post compiles the ten programming languages you should know: a top 10 of the most demanded in 2023 and an interesting roadmap if you want to be a programmer, data analysis expert, or web developer.
Digital transformation is an unstoppable trend in our society, driven by technological advances such as artificial intelligence, 5G, blockchain, a huge amount of data available to public institutions and private companies, big data, and the needs of systems and applications that process them and take advantage of them, as well as protect the information and operations of organizations (you can find more information on information security/cybersecurity here). This ecosystem of technologies, paradigms, frameworks, and needs allows an unprecedented development of applications and systems with different purposes. It makes software developers one of the most demanded professional profiles in the labour market.
Main programming languages
For the elaboration of this ranking, we start with the analysis of different parameters, such as:
Offer of jobs by languages: the parameter with the most weight for elaborating the ranking. The data is obtained from the 2022 “Most Demanded Programming Languages” analysis by devjobs scanner, which is based on scanning job offers from the leading portals; specifically, in this analysis, more than 7 million offers were reviewed between October 2021 and June 2022, resulting in:
- JavaScript/TypeScript
- Python
- Java
- C#
- PHP
- C++
- Ruby
- Go
- SQL
- Scala
The popularity of the different languages is the next parameter in weight for elaborating this ranking. The data on which we rely are those of the “TIOBE Index for February 2023”, where the popularity of the different languages is analyzed, obtaining information from the main search engine or content portals (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube ) about the number of developers trained in them, the number of courses available and companies that use them for their developments/products and professional services. The February 2023 index yields the following results:
- Python
- C
- C++
- Java
- C#
- Visual Basic
- JavaScript
- SQL
- Assembly language
- PHP
Use by developers: the parameter has the least weight in preparing the ranking. This data is obtained from the Stackoverflow “2022 Developer Survey” conducted with more than 50,000 developers, asking them about the programming language they use in their developments. The results are the following:
- JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- SQL
- Python
- TypeScript
- Java
- C#
- Bash/Shell
- PHP
- C++
Top 10 Programming Languages 2023
Based on the job offer of each of the languages, the popularity of each of them, and the use by the developer community, these would be our top 10 programming languages of 2023, and their main use is:
- JavaScript/TypeScript: web application development.
- Python: analytics and data processing.
- Java: cross-platform application development.
- C#: mobile apps, video games, desktop applications, backend and frontend of web applications.
- C++: databases, web browsers, operating systems, compilers, and video games.
- C: compilers, interpreters, editors, operating systems, and embedded programming.
- PHP: desktop applications and scripts in client-server architecture applications.
- SQL: BBDD.
- Ruby: web application development.
- Visual Basic: task automation and desktop applications.
Need help figuring out where to start? There are multiple resources for learning these programming languages. However, you are beginning in the world of software development. In that case, it is advisable to learn C, a high-level programming language with which you will acquire the necessary knowledge to learn. Any other programming language.
If what you are looking for is a language that is easy to learn and use, regardless of software development concepts and techniques, the recommendation would be to start with Python, as it is a high-level language very similar to English and with a large number of libraries to address almost any problem. But if what you want is to start programming and this is the first time you have done it, we recommend you start with these five programming languages.
JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, SQL, Java… Now that you have information about the most popular programming languages in 2023, look for the one that, by technical characteristics and by its use (app development, data analysis, desktop applications, or task automation ) best suits your future career.
