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Which programming language should you learn in 2020?

Aditya Giri on November 08, 2019

The programming world moves fast. There are a ton of different programming languages spawning every year. Enterprises use these languages as per ho...
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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

Indeed ratings:

  1. Go: 2,179 jobs (unfortunate name makes it hard to measure)
  2. Rust: 1,535 jobs
  3. Elixir: 521 jobs
  4. JS: 58,524 jobs
  5. Python: 75,337 jobs (WARNING: take with grain of salt, many jobs say "scripting languages such as.." and include python)
  6. Java: 72,380 jobs
  7. Ruby: 16,469 jobs
  8. Scala: 7,218 jobs
  9. Clojure: 431 jobs
  10. Kotlin: 2,049 jobs

One missing addition should be C# with 32,498 jobs.

So your list varies wildly in terms of "domination".. but of course Tiobe intends to measure growth trends. Indeed mainly is correlated how many unfilled jobs there are right now (ie. its an indicator of unfulfilled demand).

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Aditya Giri

Yeah. I had originally written it as a piece under title "Top trending programming languages of 2019". But then due to less reach, I had to change the title.

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude • Edited

What would be cool is to see what truly original languages there are in 2019.

Most of these commercial languages don't seem much different than their historical ancestors.
Most of what's here could be covered with a study of Smalltalk and Lisp and maybe one other language.

No real weird stuff. No parallelism, nothing truly new. Nothing weird like Haskell or Prolog. Nothing really brave like Smalltalk.

Someone once said that computer language innovation ended in 1980. I'm not sure that's exactly true, but a loss less innovation has appeared since then. Most of this list are rehashes from the past. I don't gain much learning how to write a for loop in a different language, or a mapcar/reduce.

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

Elixir seems most interesting of the bunch.

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Aditya Giri

Yeah, Elixir is one of the most effective languages among all these.

And also, thanks for that tip. I've been following a bunch of different languages like V Lang, Nim, and Zig. I'd definitely be writing an article on it.

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DavidWhit • Edited

Yes, but my two cents believes you can really do anything big or small with rust bolting on what you want to make it the language to suite your needs. I also think Rust provides a modern approach to low level programming. I only spent 3months looking into elixir and it was ok just not for me the OTP model still feels foreign. The Beam and erlang behind the scenes I'm also unfamiliar. I might be wrong but I feel its place is niche. Though as always pick what you like and go with it and dismiss others opinions.

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ambroseus profile image
Eugene Samonenko

pay attention on Dart + Flutter

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Vince Ramces Oliveros

Wait until you see: 4 years of experience in Flutter

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ambroseus profile image
Eugene Samonenko

OMG.. cool! 8)

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Victor Darkes

Nice list but I definitely disagree with learning Scala over Java. If a company desires someone who's familiar with Scala they're probably looking for someone experienced in Data Engineering. Java is ubiquitous. You might not end up with the flashiest role but you'll be able to find something stable pretty quickly.

With that said I'm partial to Kotlin as the eventual leading language of the JVM. Since it's supports functional programming my hope is that the data community adopts it one day.

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Juan Carlos

Nim lang definitely.
Scala-Native looks good too.

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Supryanto Widadi Putra

How about php? Im still learn php is that woth it for 2020?

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genta profile image
Fabio Russo

PHP won’t go anywhere from top demanding languages list.
Continue to learn It.