With the arrival of a new year, a lot of us make resolutions about the changes we want to see in our lives at the nearest time. And the changes happen everywhere — politics, ecology, media and of course, software development.

Here are the top 10 predictions about software development trends in 2020.

Java is the number one choice for programmers

Since its development in the mid-90s, Java has climbed the ranks of the world’s most popular programming languages and has been occupying the first place for years. The explanation is simple: “Write once, run everywhere”. Thanks to the high security, many large enterprises have adopted Java and such leading service providers as Google, Microsoft, Amazon support it for app development. Among such advantages as stability, extremely wide use in Android app development, automatic memory allocation and variety of open-source libraries, Java has one more benefit which is a high degree of platform independence thanks to the JVM feature. Many popular programming languages including Kotlin, Scala and Groovy use JVM as their runtime. Though, having no competitors in matters of stability and trust, Java is foreseen to continue ruling in 2020.

Rust, Java, Kotlin, TypeScript take top positions

Google officially named Kotlin a “first-class” language for Android development and the amount of ‘Kotlin’ job postings has immediately grown, meaning that anyone who seeks for Android-related position should learn it.

Another language that is attaining popularity is a superset of JavaScript — TypeScript. TypeScript is an object-oriented language, prone to fewer errors, and offers support for JavaScript libraries, that’s why its use increased from 20.8% to 46.7% in the period from 2016 to 2018.

One of the most preferred languages according to Stack Overflow Developer Survey is Rust, an open-source, memory safe and learning-friendly computer language. Rust community is a group of people who care not just about making it a good set of libraries but about making programming systems easy and safe. That’s why its popularity is not surprising.

Python is on the way to becoming the most popular language in the world

The popularity of programming language Index (the PYPL index), which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched in Google, gives Python the first place among the most popular languages with the biggest growth (19.0%) in the last 5 years. Being one of the easiest programming languages to learn, Python continues attracting more and more newbies eager to master it. According to the TIOBE index, Python has already reached its highest position so far, taking the 3rd place in the chart. This can be explained by the machine-learning boom among the number of developers learning Python. Owning a wide range of software libraries that can be dropped into a code and scaled to large applications, Python gives multiple opportunities for development from web and desktop apps to system operations arrangement. TIOBE even predicts that Python will become number one among the most popular programming languages, of course, in the long run.

Newcomers cannot take JavaScript’s position

JavaScript has been the most commonly used programming language for a while. 69.7% of professional developers use JavaScript language according to Stackoverflow Developer Survey Results 2019. There are numerous reasons for this: you can create flexible and powerful code using JavaScript, it is consistently implemented by various web browsers, which can be used in front-end and back-end web development on the client-side and server-side, allowing it to run everywhere from browsers to servers. With a wide variety of framework libraries, it gives developers an opportunity to create complex apps with low overhead. And with numerous innovations taking place, JavaScript frameworks will dominate even more in 2020.

Web frameworks: React is taking over front-end development

Because of the great focus on development simplicity and users’ experience, React has overtaken all the front-end competition. Apart from being elaborated by Facebook and obtaining effective UI, React has extremely fast updates, provides an opportunity for the user to make changes in the code without affecting other parts of the interface and has one-direction data-flow allowing writing a stable code.

With all these features React is predicted to strengthen the number one position more in 2020 and adoption of React by companies with wide-known names like Instagram and Netflix proves this.

Native app development is an attractive option for enterprises

Banks, financial institutions and big enterprises tend to choose native app development over hybrid, and it will remain the same in 2020. The main reason is security. The native app provides substantial protection of customers’ data, user-friendly interface, and smooth performance. Enterprises eager to show that they don’t save on their client’s experience and will continue opting for native app development.

Cross-platform app development: why React is going to dominate

Developing a cross-platform application might be a great decision in many cases. There are multiple options for cross-platform development like veterans (Ionic and Xamarin) and newbies (React Native and Flutter). React Native was developed by Facebook based on mature and successful web framework React, which we’ve discussed above. It shares the same base, offers high code reusability and is used by Facebook in the mobile application development. The popularity of React app development is increasing considering all the positive changes being constantly implemented into React Ecosystem.

Tensorflow 2.0 is the next level for the Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence continues to grow every year and is becoming a foundation for many technologies around the world. Possessing simplified and integrated workflow, eager execution, integration for Swift and IOS, optimization for Android, and many other great features, the deep learning framework TensorFlow, elaborated by Google is predicted to become a world leader in deep learning and artificial neural nets in 2020.

Big Data streaming: Flink for the future

Real-time data processing framework Flink is gaining popularity due to the ability to prevent the blocking of TCP channels, to minimize data transfer, to reduce garbage collection and offering space-efficient storage of data. Flink is considered to be the most powerful real-time data processing system nowadays and will definitely keep this position in the next few years.

Big Data Computation: Spark will continue to sparkle

Spark has taken the place of Hadoop in the world of batch processing and now is thought to be the most popular open-source project on the planet, with more than 1,000 contributors from more than 250 organizations. With the ability to run anywhere, Spark offers a wide range of specialized processing engines (SQL engine, a real-time streaming analytics engine, a machine learning library, and a graph database).

If you want to be on the wave with software development in 2020, don’t hesitate to contact us at inVerita. We’ll do our best to implement any of these trends into your solution.