Introduction:
From time to time, we come across different programming languages that we have slight knowledge about, and the list keeps increasing. This made me wonder what are programming languages in the market and how they might compare between different segments.
Luckily, Stack Overflow has asked this question along with other 60 questions in their 2020 developer survey. More than 64,000 people have participated in the survey. Going through the survey results, I saw many interesting points that captured my attention and required some representation and analysis. Programming languages used the ones they consider to explore and learn further were on the top of the list. The other one was related to the job-seeking and what are the top factors individuals look at when considering a job.
Part I: What are the top used programing languages and which ones could gain popularity in upcoming years?
As illustrated in figure 1, we can observe that Java programming language is widely used, as about 16% of the people have mentioned that they have used it in the past year. The list contains 23 programing language; however, only a few used widely and more than half of the languages in the list are used by less than 2% of the people.
As with spoken languages, it is worth it to analyze languages that people are considering to learn next year and those that are not. Records in the table below are sorted by the percentage of people considering to work with the language in the upcoming year, where the difference column is to illustrate the difference between the number of people working with the language this year and want to work with it next year. Although the top five languages are still on the top of the list for the next year, except for Python, fewer people are considering to work with them next year. R, Rust, and Kotlin percentage of users could more than double in the upcoming year, but there is still a big gap for them to reach the top five.
Part II: Comparing the language used by developers by profession and others, is there a noticeable difference between them?
After looking at the percentage for the languages used in the past year, I have started to wonder if there would be a big difference between people who consider themselves as developers by profession and others. I have expected more differences between the two groups.
It turns out that languages in the top five are the same for both sets, but the order of usage is different. Below table provide more details in that regard; we can observe that the most significant difference between the two sets are in Python and TypeScript, where the first one is more popular among not coders by profession and the other is used more by developers by profession.
Part III: How job seeking is compared across different segmentation?
Switching from the language to the job market, I have started to analyze the job-seeking for different groups to see the overall picture. Two means that on average individuals on that group are looking for job and zero implies they are not looking for a job. I have added 0.5 for not actively looking, but looking for new opportunities because it would be closer to hold the current job.
I have analyzed different segmentation groups; majority of them had a mean that is at 0.5 or more. The top groups I felt worth sharing are values for grouping by undergrad major and job satisfaction. Results are shared in the table below, and they were as expected for job satisfaction; the more people are satisfied, the less they will look for new jobs, and the opposite is true. For undergraduate major, it is interested to see that natural science majors are closer to hold the job while looking for new opportunities. On the other hand web designers are the most active in looking for new opportunities, maybe it is because the top-five languages can be linked to web development and there is a shortage in that area.
When building a model to study the factors affecting the job seeking, the first one as expected is being Unemployed. Next top factor, was job satisfaction, in particular when being Very satisfied. As seen in table 4, when being very satisfied it affect job seeking in the opposite direction.Conclusion
In this post, I have gone through the top languages used in the market these days along. We have seen that the top-five programming languages (Java, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL and Python) will most likely stay the same in the near future. They are used widely in the market irrespective of the industry or organization. Finally, people who had Web design / Development are the most active in looking for a job and looking for new opportunities.
To see more about this analysis, see the link to my Github available here.
