Knowing the most popular programming languages among developers can help recruiters discover the best talent, by zeroing in on those tech pros who are clearly keeping in-demand skills up-to-date. In August, IEEE Spectrum combined data from various sources (such as GitHub and its own digital library) in order to rank the popularity of 48 different languages. Here’s their top 10:
- Java
- C
- C++
- Python
- C#
- R
- PHP
- JavaScript
- Ruby
- MATLAB
Nothing in this list should surprise people who keep track of programming-language rankings across various analyst sites, where Java, C, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and a handful of others have dominated the top 10 for quite some time. (Another much-referenced list, published by Google in May, placed Java, SQL, HTML, Python, and C as the top five most-searched languages.) In addition, the lists produced in 2015 generally mirror those from the preceding year. Although technology is a fast-evolving industry by definition, some of its fundamentals—including the widespread use of languages such as JavaScript—tend to stay stubbornly static from year to year. That’s also good news for recruiters, as it translates into a consistent baseline of popular skills to measure candidates against. The biggest movement on these lists generally occurs in the middle rankings, where lesser-used but increasingly popular languages such as Apple’s Swift and Google’s Go battle it out with older languages on the decline. Those rising languages are worth keeping an eye on; but in the meantime, a recruiter looking for skilled programmers should ensure their candidates know the widely-used ones. Image: Syda Productions/Shutterstock.com