IEEE's Top Programming Languages of 2022: Python (and SQL)

The IEEE's official publication, IEEE Spectrum, has released its ninth annual ranking of the top programming languages. The results'Python remains on top but is closely followed by C. Indeed, the combined popularity of C and the big C-like languagesC++ and C#would outrank Python by some margin. Java also remains popular, as does Javascript, the latter buoyed by the ever-increasing complexity of websites and in-browser tools (although it's worth noting that in some quarters, the cool thing is now deliberately stripped-down static sites built with just HTML and simple CSS). But among these stalwarts is the rising popularity of SQL. In fact, it's at No. 1 in our Jobs ranking, which looks solely at metrics from the IEEE Job Site and CareerBuilder. Having looked through literally hundreds and hundreds of job listings in the course of compiling these rankings for you, dear reader, I can say that the strength of the SQL signal is not because there are a lot of employers looking for just SQL coders, in the way that they advertise for Java experts or C++ developers. They want a given language plus SQL. And lots of them want that "plus SQL...." Job listings are of course not the only metrics we look at in Spectrum. A complete list of our sources is here, but in a nutshell we look at nine metrics that we think are good proxies for measuring what languages people are programming in. Sources include GitHub, Google, Stack Overflow, Twitter, and IEEE Xplore [their library of technical content]. The raw data is normalized and weighted according to the different rankings offeredfor example, the Spectrum default ranking is heavily weighted toward the interests of IEEE members, while Trending puts more weight on forums and social-media metrics. Python is still #1 in their "Trending" view of language popularity, but with Java in second place (followed by C, JavaScript, C++ and C#and then SQL). PHP is nexttheir 8th-most-trending language, followed by HTML, Go, R, and Rust.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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