Top programming languages in use 2000-2020 [informal study]

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Summary

This informal long-time study gives a broad estimate of what programming languages are used commercially in the US. For the last 20 years, I’ve done a job search at www.dice.com for some of the most popular languages.

Main takeaways:

Some much-talked-about languages find only little use in industry.

Java, JavaScript, and Python have taken a large and stable market share during the last 20 years.

C/C++ has slipped to fourth position.

A huge number of programming jobs disappeared from the US job market after the dot-com crash in 2000.

Language trends 2000–2020

Number of hits (x1,000) on Dice, tech jobs search engine, March 2020.

(year) 00 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 16 18 20 Java 55 3 8 14 16 12 18 17 16 15 11 JavaScript 5 1 2 4 6 6 11 12 12 10 9 Python 1 1 2 4 5 7 8 7 C/C++ (*) 75 2 5 16 9 12 18 16 8 7 4 C# 1 5 8 6 9 8 7 6 3 PHP 1 2 2 4 3 3 2 1 Perl 18 1 2 5 5 4 5 4 4 3 1 ASP 11 7 4 6 5 2 1 0.9 Bash 1 2 2 0.7 Scala 1 1 0.5 Ruby 1 2 2 3 2 0.5 TypeScript 0.4 JSP 4 4 3 3 2 1 1 0.4 R 2 0.3 Visual Basic 21 1 2 3 2 1 2 1 12 9 0.3 Swift 1 0.3 Objective C 2 6 5 0.3

(*) Back in 2000 it made sense to lump C and C++ together.

Top languages 2020

Number of hits on Dice, tech jobs search engine.

Java 11,484 JavaScript 8,897 Python 6,612 C or C++ 4,168 C# 3,255 PHP 1,002 Perl 990 ASP 887 Bash 727 Scala 496 Ruby 453 TypeScript 404 JSP 370 R 350 Visual Basic 328 Swift 298 Objective-C 259 Matlab 221 Cobol 217 Kotlin 215 Go 175 Crystal 170 VBA 164 Assembly 109 Groovy 96 Ada 68 F# 40 Fortran 23 Tcl 19 Elixir 13 Rust 9 Dart 8 Delphi 7 Elm 7 Smalltalk 7 Lisp 6 awk 5 Lua 5 Clojure 4 Haskell 3 Pascal 3 Erlang 2 Scheme 2 Prolog 1

Further reading

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