Programming Languages: The Current Trends and Useful Future Direction
Based on a Recent Analyst Report, WillDom Responds and Aligns with Trends in Programming Languages
We’d like to congratulate SlashData for releasing another incredibly insightful report! In April 2021, based on their Q1 2021 survey, SlashData released their 20th Edition “State of the Developer Nation” report. For those unaware, SlashData is a leading analyst company in the developer economy and tracks global developer trends based on more than 30,000 software developers annually in over 160 countries.
This report surveyed more than 19,000 developers worldwide to track the ever-developing tech landscape in its varying sectors.
At WillDom, we have more than 3,700 software developers and engineers within our community (that might have responded to this exact survey) and believe that fostering a healthy and well-informed community is paramount to navigating through the evolving door of the technology industry. We are excited that SlashData translates this feedback into relevant information that software developers and engineers can use for their current and future positions.
With six parts, we took a look at the first section, “Programming Language Communities — an Update,” as WillDom contains technologists knowledgeable in over 90 programming languages. Here are a few elements that we found interesting and aligned with what WillDom is seeing in the industry:
- “JavaScript is the most popular programming language by some distance, with nearly 14M developers using it globally.” WillDom strongly believes that JavaScript is one of the main competencies for software developers and engineers, and that it will continue to be one of the most popular languages in the future. In fact, when evaluating our technical talent pool for the 2020 calendar year, we found that JavaScript was the core competency for most of our community. Additionally, as you can see in the below graph, JavaScript is nearly at the level of adoption for all of last year in our community — in only the first two months of 2021.
- “The fastest-growing language community in percentage terms is Kotlin.” Towards the end of 2020, as we were evaluating tech competencies for the new year, our technical team predicted that Kotlin would grow in popularity. This is the very first bullet that we indicated in our “Specialized Skills for 2021” section of the blog post: “By early 2020 we were all prepared for a massive need of Golang developers, a trend which has verified over the present year; and although it has been a rather unusual year, we will continue to see some of the top coding languages still being the most wanted tech skills in 2021: Google’s Golang, Ruby, Kotlin and Swift for mobile app coding.” We’re glad to see that three of the four languages we chose appeared in the top 10 programming languages of SlashData’s report.
SlashData serves as an essential benchmark and allows companies to stay updated on industry statistics and information that only strengthens them. Vanessa Cañete, Branch Director From Paraguay’s office added: “Choosing the right tech stack for a new software project is incredibly important for the sustainability of the product. It determines how easy it’s going to be to assemble the team at the start, and recover from a team member’s absence in the future.” Needless to say that following these trends could be the key to avoiding or at least reducing the technical debt risk from the beginning of the project.
We’re excited to continue to track, encourage, and utilize software developers and engineers worldwide and in our community, as they lead the way in creating incredible technology through traditional and emerging programming languages. Learn how WillDom developers are continuing to push the boundaries of technology by visiting WillDom.com or emailing us at hey@willdom.com if you’re a developer looking to connect and collaborate with like-minded professionals.
