The Most Popular Programming Languages According to Google
Software development is driving the world with everything from mobile to aircrafts depending on it. Whether it is mission critical applications or popular games on your mobile devices, software programming plays a part in it.
The evolution of programming languages is quite fascinating and dates back to 1940s and 50s. The first high level programming language was Plankalkül developed by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first language designed for engineering purposes.
The first commercial available language was FORTRAN developed in 1956 at IBM.
FORTRAN provided a way of porting code from one computer to the others. The early days of programming were all about machine codes, assembly languages and low level machine details for programmers.
Today the programming languages are geared towards internet driven technologies, mobility, distribution, scalability and performance. There are myriads options for programmers today and wide availability of tutorials to learn exciting things.
The PYPL index or popularity of programming language index is created by looking at Google search trends for language tutorials. Here we look at the most popular programming languages in the world today.
1. Python
Python grabs the top spot with more than 26.42% search queries. It has grown the most in the last 5 years by 16.2%. It is the most soughted programming language in the world. Python was first launched in 1991 and grown with the popularity of internet. Python showed an increase of over 5% from last year.
2. Java
Java is ranked the second most popular language. It is searched by 21.3% people; every fifth query related to languages searched Java. The popularity of java has been on a slight decline over the years. There was a decrease of 1.3% people who searched java compared to last year. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1995, now owned by Oracle.
3. JavaScript
JavaScript is the third most popular language with roughly 8.21% searches. It is one of the core technologies of the web for making interactive websites and web applications. All major web browsers support it and even have a JS engine to execute javascript code. JavaScript was first launched in 1995 and supported by major international companies. JavaScript promotes open web standards, its APIs & standards are well documented in W3C.
4. C#
C# is the fourth most popular language. The C# tutorials were searched by 7.57% persons, a decline of 0.5% since last year. C# remains one of the most popular enterprise software languages developed by Microsoft. The C sharp language was developed and launched by Microsoft around 2000.
5. PHP
Closed behind C# is PHP on number five. It was searched by 7.34% of all users. Compared to last year, there was a drop of 1.2% in search queries related to PHP. Infact, in the last 5 years, PHP has lost the most with a decline of 5.6%. PHP was first launched by Zend technologies in 1995 and has been one of the widely used web programming languages.
6. C & C++
C & C++ are next on the list. These were searched by 6.23% people down 0.3% since last year. The C and C++ languages are used for system programming, application programs, embedded systems and super computers among others. The C language was developed in 1972 and is used for writing the kernel or the central part of unix operating system. C++ was earlier known as “C with Classes,” and was launched in 1985. Both C and C++ are used for various mission critical applications and make interaction with machines possible through programming.
7. R
R is the seventh most popular language. It is a programming language for statistics, computing and graphics. R is used by researchers, statisticians, data miners and data scientists. It’s a free programming language and was first launched in 1993. R was searched by 4.13% users. The language has gained more traction and acceptance from users in recent years due to data mining and analytics drive applications.
8. Objective C
Objective C is the eight on this list of most searched programming languages. The objective C is a general purpose programming language. It was developed by Apple in the 1980s.The language was searched by 3.04% of the users, down 0.8% from last year. It was the language used for the MacOS and iOS operating systems. The language was launched in 1984. It was also used for NEXT for its operating system. The Mac and iOS were derived from this operating system.
9. Swift
Swift is a general purpose language developed by Apple for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux and z/OS. It works with Apple’s touch frameworks like Cocoa. Swift is an extension and is designed to support Objective C for many of Apple’s existing products. Swift tutorials were searched by 2.56% users, down 0.6% from the previous year.
10. Matlab
Matlab is the tenth most searched programming language on Google. Matlab is widely used for simulations, statistics, plotting of functions, data analysis and visualisation etc. The PYPL index shows that Matlab was searched by 1.98% users, down 0.4% from last year. Matlab was launched by MathWorks, an American computing software company in 1984.
Conclusion:
Software companies and technology are playing an increasingly dominant role in shaping industries, governance and our day to day lives. There are plenty of programming languages with rich features and functionality that enable programmers to build platforms to build incredible things. If you need any assistance for software product development or business process automation, please get in touch with us.