Which Programming Language Should You Learn in 2017? Survey Insights Revealed

At the start of the new year, the author reflects on career planning and presents data from the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, covering language usage, favorite languages, most dreaded languages, and technologies developers want to learn.

Stack Overflow Survey – Language Usage (2016)

JavaScript — 55.4%

SQL — 49.1%

Java — 36.3%

C# — 30.9%

PHP — 25.9%

Python — 24.9%

C++ — 19.4%

AngularJS — 17.9% (JavaScript framework)

Node.js — 17.2% (server‑side JavaScript)

C — 15.5%

Most Preferred Languages

Rust — 79.1%

Swift — 72.1%

F# — 70.7%

Scala — 69.4%

Go — 68.7%

Clojure — 66.7%

React — 66.0%

Haskell — 64.7%

Python — 62.5%

C# — 62.0%

Most Dreaded Languages

Visual Basic — 79.5%

WordPress — 74.3%

Matlab — 72.8%

SharePoint — 72.1%

CoffeeScript — 71.0%

LAMP — 68.7% (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

Cordova — 66.9%

Salesforce — 65.4%

Perl — 61.3%

SQL — 60.3%

Technologies Developers Want to Learn

Android — 15.8%

Node.js — 14.8%

AngularJS — 13.4%

Python — 13.3%

JavaScript — 11.9%

React — 9.2%

Swift — 8.7%

MongoDB — 8.1%

Arduino / Raspberry Pi — 8.0%

C++ — 8.0%

Stack Overflow Question/Answer Statistics

JavaScript — 16.6%

Java — 14.7%

Android — 11.5%

Python — 11.4%

C# — 11.1%

PHP — 8.6%

jQuery — 6.7%

C++ — 6.6%

HTML — 6.6%

iOS — 6.3%

PYPL Programming Language Popularity Index

Java — 23.1%

Python — 14.4%

PHP — 9.7%

C# — 8.4%

JavaScript — 7.7%

C — 7.1%

C++ — 7.0%

Objective‑C — 4.4%

R — 3.4%

Swift — 3.0%

TIOBE Index 2017

Java — 17.3%

C — 9.3%

C++ — 6.3%

C# — 4.0%

Python — 3.5%

VisualBasic.NET — 3.0%

JavaScript — 2.9%

Perl — 2.7%

Assembly Language — 2.7%

PHP — 2.6%

The author notes that survey results have limitations, such as sample bias and outdated search‑engine data, and emphasizes that no language is universally best. Learning fundamentals of any language makes it easier to pick up others, and continuous learning across front‑end and back‑end technologies is encouraged.