I am writing a book on Collaborative Development using Git and GitHub and as you might have noticed I write about a lot of stuff on this web site. In order to know which languages should I cover in the book and what subjects should I write about, I asked what are the 3 most important programming languages to my readers. I meant either languages they already use, languages they'd need to learn, or they'd like to learn.

The results

First language

Perl 40.2%

Perl 5 20.9%

Python 9.9%

C 5.2%

JavaScript 4.9 %

Java 3.5%

C++ 3.3%

Bash 3.1%

Second language

JavaScript 20.2%

Python 16.7%

Perl 12.2%

Bash 12%

C 6.4%

Java 6.1%

C++ 5.2%

Perl 5 4.7%

Go 2.8

C# 2.8

Third language

JavaScript 16.9%

Python 13.4%

PHP 6.4%

Bash 15.5%

C 9.9%

C++ 6.8%

Go 6.4%

Java 4.7%

Perl 3.8%

Perl 5 2.8%

Total

There were a total 1275 answers (3* 425 respondents) this is the distribution of the answers.

Perl 239 18.74 % JavaScript 179 14.03 % Python 170 13.33 % Bash 130 10.19 % Perl 5 121 9.49 % C 91 7.13 % C++ 65 5.09 % Java 61 4.78 % Go 48 3.76 % PHP 38 2.98 % C# 29 2.27 % Ruby 20 1.56 % Swift 17 1.33 % Scala 12 0.94 % Perl 6 10 0.78 % Lua 9 0.7 % Delphi/Pascal 8 0.62 % Objective-C 6 0.47 % Haskell 6 0.47 % Rust 5 0.39 % Erlang 4 0.31 % Zsh 4 0.31 % Elixir 3 0.23 %

Raw data

The raw data can be downloaded here.

Background

The survey ran between 2017.10.20-2017.10.30. We got 425 responses.

On 2017.10.20 I sent the out the link to the subscribers of the Perl Maven site then on 2017.10.23 I've included it in the 326th edition of the Perl Weekly newsletter. Later I've also posted it on LinkedIN and Tweeted about it.

So a strong bias towards Perl is expected.

During the survey I've added several new items:

Rust

Haskell

Zsh

Elixir

Erlang

People also asked for these two, but I have not added them. Maybe next time I run the survey.

SQL

PowerShell

In addition, at the beginning there was one item called "Perl" that was later replace by "Perl 5" and "Perl 6".

Next survey

Continuous Integration Systems