programming languages

The top 7 programming languages to learn in 2018


Which programming languages are the ones employers want most?

Software development is a dynamic field. New programming languages, frameworks, and technologies can emerge, become popular, and then fade away in the course of a few years. Developers need to constantly be learning new skills to stay relevant. At Coding Dojo, we’re continually evaluating which programming languages are in high demand from employers so we can prepare our students to enter the job market. There are many ways to measure a programming language’s popularity, but we believe examining job demand is most useful because it shows developers how to improve their career prospects.

To accomplish that, we analyzed data from job website Indeed.com on 25 programming languages, stacks, and frameworks to determine the top seven most in-demand coding languages as we move into 2018. This analysis is based on the number of job postings for each language. Some languages like Swift and Ruby didn’t make the top seven because they have lower job demand, even though developers love them. You can read the results of similar analysis from 2016 and 2017 on our blog.

Here’s our list, in order from most to least in-demand.

1) Java
Java decreased in popularity by about 6,000 job postings in 2018 compared to 2017, but is still extremely well-established. Java is over 20 years old, used by millions of developers and billions of devices worldwide, and able to run on any hardware and operating system through the Java Virtual Machine. All Android apps are based on Java and 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Java as a server-side language for back-end development. Java Enterprise Edition 8 and Java 9 both launched in September 2017 as the Eclipse Foundation took over managing Java EE from Oracle.

(Next page: 6 more in-demand programming languages to know, along with a list of bonus languages)

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