It wasn’t only for the inevitability of my bachelor’s and masters studies in computer science at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), that attracted me to learn the French language but it also was my feebleness for the art of French literature that inspired me to learn it. I took a one-year intensive diploma course in the French language. Then as soon I started my bachelors’ studies, I had no choice than to start learning another language, and that was “Pascal”! and at that instant, it was a programming language. Dough Cooper’s Oh Pascal! was the first-ever programming language book that I received from my elder brother who brought me that from New York (he was there on a UN work assignment). I remember, he also got me Donald Knuth’s “Concrete Mathematics” at the same time. But my all-time favourite book on Pascal was Peter Grogono’s “La Programmation en Pascal“. I still have that book as you can see me holding it in the picture with this article.
At the uni, we had to learn Pascal, which was a popular procedural programming language and still is. We also had to learn COBOL, FORTRAN and Visual Basic. However, today the most desired programming language is “Python” according to the annual developer survey by stack overflow. With nearly 65,000 responses fielded from over 180 countries and dependent territories, their 2020 Annual Developer Survey examined all aspects of the developer experience from career satisfaction and job search to education and opinions on open-source software.
This has fascinated me a lot and motivated me to write this article: most interestingly, the technology part of this survey. With the explosive growth of cloud computing and associated technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, Python language has become a centre of attention due to its strong links to data science. In fact, Python is the most widely used programming language for data scientists today. This language allows the integration of SQL, TensorFlow, and many other useful functions and libraries for data science and machine learning. Because of the current pandemic situation, many companies are looking for fast-track digital transformation and jobs such as data scientist, and data analysts are becoming mainstream.
Accordingly to this survey JavaScript has maintained it’s stronghold as the most commonly used programming language. Going further down the list, we also see moderate gains for TypeScript, edging out C in terms of popularity.
The most exciting result was the popularity of “Rust” – which clearly flagged the indubitable demand for open-source system development. Rust is an open-source systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety and parallelism. Developers are using Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components and simulation engines for virtual reality. 86.1% developers said, “Rust” was their “loved” programming language.
In terms, of developer’s primary choices of the operating system, 45.8%, developing on Windows 27.5% MacOs and 26.6% on Linux. Globally, respondents who use Perl, Scala, and Go tend to have the highest salaries, with a median wage of around $75k. Interestingly, Perl is amongst the topmost dreaded languages, so it’s possible that this high salary is to compensate for the dearth of developers who want to use that technology. When looking only at the US, Scala developers tend to have the highest salaries.
Check the full survey result here: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey
Python for Data Science and AI Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/python-for-applied-data-science-ai