IEEE Spectrum 2019: most popular languages
Although the changes in our underlying metrics mean that we have to be careful when directly comparing this year’s rankings to last year’s, the general outline of results remains similar, with Python firmly on top.
Welcome to IEEE Spectrum’s sixth annual interactive ranking of the top programming languages. This year we’ve done a major overhaul, changing some of the underlying metrics and building a new streamlined interface. But our basic idea and methodology remains the same: combining data from multiple sources to rank the popularity of the programming languages that are used for the type of coding you are interested in.
We take this approach to get around the two fundamental obstacles to all attempts to determine the popularity of programming languages: (1) No one can actually look over the shoulder of every coder around the world as they tap away at the keyboard, and (2) a language that’s a cornerstone of one programming domain might be utterly irrelevant in another. Spectrum gets data for 11 metrics from 8 sources that we think are good proxies for popularity, and we combine the results in an app that lets you filter languages and adjust the weights given to each metric. The upshot is a ranking that’s right for you. (As part of our overhaul, we’ve retired two metrics that we used in previous years because we didn’t think they were yielding good quality data anymore, incorporated data from the IEEE Job Site, and added some new languages to the list, such as Dart.)
Of course, we’ve also got some preset weightings built in that are optimized for job seekers, for example, or folks interested in diving into an open-source side project. Our default weighting is optimized for the typical Spectrum reader, so let’s take a look at what it shows as the top 10 languages of 2019.