JavaScript is still the most popular programming language by use in the world, with 65 percent of developers surveyed in JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2022 report having used it in the past 12 months.
Python continued its upward trend, with over half of all developers using it. It has also quickly become a primary programming language for developers, with 32 percent of developers claiming it as a primary language. Only JavaScript has a larger number of primary language users.
TypeScript was the fastest growing language in 2022, and has seen remarkable growth as a language over the past five years, rising from 12 percent usage in 2017 to 34 percent in 2022. As one of the primary alternative forms of JavaScript, it has gained a lot of popularity, especially amongst large-scale JavaScript developers for its project scalability, collaboration, and code maintainability.
See also: Python Top Programming Language, But SQL Gets You Noticed
As new programming languages like Julia and others become popular, some of the old guard have seen a decline in usage. In 2022, less developers said they had used HTML/CSS, Java, PHP, and Ruby than the year before. Languages such as SQL, Swift, and Objective-C have stagnated, with similar usage to the previous year.
According to the developers surveyed, Kotlin, C#, and Python are the three favorite programming languages to use, relative to the number of users. On the other end of the spectrum, Perl, Visual Basic, Delphi and C are the least favorite languages to use, with 96 percent of Perl users sharing a dislike of the language.
Developers are most interested in the programming language Go, with 12 percent of respondents planning to adopt or migrate to the language in the next 12 months.
In terms of language usage by platform, Go was the most popular for cloud at 27 percent, followed by Python and C#. For server and infrastructure tasks, Go was again the most popular language, followed by Python and C++.
When discussing the future, developers believe AI/ML is the most promising technology, with blockchain and AR/VR also considered as potentially innovative. Rust was the most promising programming language, followed by Go and Kotlin.
