NEWS COMPUTING

The Top Programming Languages 2024 Typescript and Rust are among the rising stars
BY STEPHEN CASS
22 AUG 2024

Stephen Cass is the special projects editor at IEEE Spectrum.

Spectrum Trending Jobs

Python

Java 0.4855
JavaScript 0.4451
C++ 0.3749
TypeScript 0.2497
SQL 0.2258
C# 0.2089
Go 0.2052
C 0.1989
HTML 0.1817
Rust 0.1506
Mathematica 0.1275
PHP 0.1196
Shell 0.117
Lua 0.1041
SAS 0.0855
Kotlin

Ruby

Dart

Swift

Scala

Solidity

Matlab

Perl

Groovy

Objective-C

Visual Basic

Apex

Arduino

Pascal

Julia

Assembly

ABAP

Elixir

Verilog

LabView

Haskell

Cobol

TCL

Cuda

Lisp

VHDL

Clojure

Fortran

Ocaml

WebAssembly

Erlang

Co�eeScript

Ada

F#

Scheme

Prolog

Ladder Logic
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Welcome to IEEE Spectrum’s 11th annual rankings of the most popular programming languages. As always, we combine multiple metrics from di�erent sources to create three meta rankings. The “Spectrum”
ranking is weighted towards the profile of the typical IEEE member, the “Trending” ranking seeks to spot languages that are in the zeitgeist, and the “Jobs” ranking measures what employers are looking for.

You can find a full breakdown of our methodology here, but let’s jump into our results. At the top, Python continues to cement its overall dominance, buoyed by things like popular libraries for hot fields such
as AI as well as its pedagogical prominence. (For most students today, if they learn one programming language in school, it’s Python.) Python’s pretty popular with employers too, although there its lead over
other general purpose languages is not as large and, like last year, it plays second fiddle to the database query language SQL, which employers like to see paired with another language. SQL popularity with
employers is a natural extension of today’s emphasis on networked and cloud-based system architectures, where databases become the natural repository for all the bytes a program’s logic is chewing on.

Top Programming Languages 2024 is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society. Get connected with the world’s largest community empowering computer science and engineering professionals.

TALWARTS LIKE JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, AND C++ ALSO RETAIN HIGH RANKINGS, BUT IT’S WHAT’S GOING ON A LITTLE FURTHER DOWN THAT’S PARTICULARLY INTERESTING.

S
Typescript—a superset of Javascript—moves up several places on all the rankings, especially for Jobs, where it climbs to fourth place, versus 11th last year. Typescript’s primary di�erentiator over
Javascript is that it enforces static typing of variables, where the type of a variable—integer, floating point, text, and so forth—must be declared before it can be used. This allows for more error
checking when Typescript programs are compiled to Javascript, and the increase in reliability has proven appealing.

Another climber is Rust, a language aimed at creating system software, like C or C++. But unlike those two languages, Rust is “memory safe”, meaning it uses a variety of techniques to ensure
programs can’t write to locations in memory that they are not supposed to. Such errors are a major source of security vulnerabilities. Rust’s profile has been rising sharply, boosted by things like a February
cybersecurity report from the White House calling for memory safe languages to replace C and and C++. Indeed, C’s popularity appears to be on the wane, falling from fourth to ninth place on the Spectrum
ranking and from 7th to 13th on the Jobs ranking.

Two languages have entered the rankings for the first time: Apex and Solidity. Apex is designed for building business applications that use a Salesforce server as a back end, and Solidity is designed for creating
smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

This year also saw several languages drop out of the rankings. This doesn’t mean a language is completely dead, it just means that these languages’ signal is too weak to allow them to be meaningfully ranked.
Languages that dropped out included Forth, a personal favorite of mine that’s still popular with folks building 8-bit retro systems because of its tiny footprint. A weak signal is also why we haven’t included
some buzzy languages such as Zig, although those proficient in it can apparently command some high salaries.

As these other languages come and go from the rankings, I have to give the shout out to the immortals, Fortran and Cobol. Although they are around 65 years old, you can still find employers looking for
programmers in both. For Fortran, this tends to be for a select group of people who are also comfortable with high-energy physics, especially the kind of high-energy physics that goes boom (and with the
security clearances to match). Cobol is more broadly in demand, as many government and financial systems still rely on decades-old infrastructure—and the recent paralyzing impact of the Cloudstrike/
Microsoft Windows outage incident probably hasn’t done much to encourage their replacement!