We did an informal poll around the Hackaday bunker and decided that, for most of us, our favorite programming language is solder. However, [Stephen Cass] over at IEEE Spectrum released their annual post on The Top Programming Languages. We thought it would be interesting to ask you what you think is the “top” language these days and why.
The IEEE has done this since 2013, but even they admit there are some issues with how you measure such an abstract idea. For one thing, what does “top” mean anyway? They provide three rankings. The first is the “Spectrum” ranking, which draws data from various public sources, including Google search, Stack Exchange, and GitHub.
The post argues that as AI coding “help” becomes more ubiquitous, you will care less and less about what language you use. This is analogous to how most programmers today don’t really care about the machine language instruction set. They write high-level language code, and the rest is a detail beneath their notice. They also argue that this will make it harder to get new languages in the pipeline. In the old days, a single book on a language could set it on fire. Now, there will need to be a substantial amount of training data for the AI to ingest. Even now, there have been observations that AI writes worse code for lesser-used languages.
A few surprises: Visual Basic is still holding its own in the job market. Verilog outweighs VHDL, but VHDL still has more jobs than LabVIEW. Who would guess? There are still pockets of Ada. Meanwhile, Fortran and Arduino are about equally ranked, as far as jobs go (though we would argue that Arduino is really C++).
So you tell us. Do you agree with the rankings? Do you think hackers would rank languages differently? Will AI reduce us to describing algorithms instead of writing them? We aren’t holding our breath, but who knows what tomorrow brings? Discuss in the comments.