Are You Teaching The Programming Languages That Will Best Prepare Students For The Workforce?

Each year, we summarize the most popular programming languages in industry to assist educators with aligning their curriculum to workforce needs. In 2017 and 2018, the industry data pointed to Java and JavaScript as being critical programming languages to include in CS/technology curriculum. Let’s see what the data says in 2019!

In our annual study of programming languages, we consider two lenses: the languages in demand by industry and the languages in use by professional developers.

For the industry demand lens, we review New Relic’s annual list of ‘The Most Popular Programming Languages”. In 2019, New Relic used seven, reputable, third-party sources and their own methodology to zero in on Java, JavaScript, and C as the three most popular/in use languages. Of particular interest to us was their list of the ‘Most Requested’ programming languages which is derived from Indeed.com’s job posting data. Indeed.com is the top job site in the world with 250 million unique visitors to its site each month. The Indeed.com list shows the most in demand languages as:

1. Java

2. SQL

3. JavaScript

4. Python

5. HTML

A second lens we consider is which languages are actually used by software developers. In past years, we have studied this using results from Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey. Stack Overflow is an online community and Q&A site for software developers. In 2019, more than 72,500 professional developers shared which programming languages they use most:

1. JavaScript

2. HTML/CSS

3. SQL

4. Python

5. Java

This year, we also looked to GitHub’s October 2019 report titled ‘The State of the Octoverse’. GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, is a community where people ‘learn, share, and work together to build software’. Each year, GitHub’s ‘The State of the Octoverse’ report details characteristics of the people that are part of its community along with information about the projects completed and programming languages used in the community. Over the time period of October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019, the top languages (based on the number of unique contributors) were:

1. Javascript

2. Python

3. Java

4. PHP

5. C#

While the data is less decisive this year, we continue to recommend that educators include Java and JavaScript in their CS/technology curriculum. In addition, educators should consider introducing Python to their students. These three languages were consistently present in the top 5 positions of the lists we reviewed.

How do these recommendations align with the programming languages you currently teach your students? Do you have other data sources for gathering industry data like this? We’d welcome your insights (info@couragion.com).