In one of my old articles, the Best Programming Languages In 2014, I talked about the most popular and the highest-paying programming languages. In the same article, I also talked about the meaning of “the best”. The meaning of “the best” actually depends on you. It depends on your needs. For you, “the best” language may be the language which pays you the most. or the language which lets you work from home, or the language which is the most versatile language and lets you work on some cool and exciting stuff.

Finding the best programming language also depends on your background. I started my programming career in 1993 with C, C++, and Pascal. I worked with Basic, Ada, Fortran and several other languages. When I started my first job, I used Visual Basic and Visual C++ and I worked with Visual C++ and Delphi till 1999. 1999 was the year when Microsoft introduced C# and since then, I’ve been working with C#. So for me, C# is the best programming language.

In this article, we will talk about some of the best programming languages of 2016, based on their popularity, their demand and their usefulness.

Most Popular Programming Language

Let’s look at the Most Popular Programming Languages Of 2016. Clearly, Java, C, C++, C# and Python are the top five languages in the list.

Highest-Paying Programming Language

Java, C, C++ and SQL have been the industry leaders for the past decade or so and are still the most demanding programming languages in the world. Here is a table that lists the salaries for the languages from some of the top ranking search results in Google. The salaries listed in the following table are for USA and all the figures are in US dollars.

Here is a more detailed article, the Highest-Paying Programming Languages Of 2016. However, the numbers shown above do not do it justice, simply because I see C# programmers getting paid more than $100k in small towns where there are not enough programmers. It is all about supply and demand.

Most In-Demand Programming Languages

The most in-demand programming language can be directly proportional to the number of jobs available in the market. Based on the data gathered from Indeed, a report published on CodingDojo lists the languages, given below, as the most in-demand in 2016-

SQL

Java

JavaScript

C#

Python

C++

PHP

Objective-C/Swift

Ruby/Ruby on Rails

Business Insider ranks the languages, given below, the most in-demand-

Java

PHP

Perl

C

Objective-C

JavaScript

Visual Basic

Ruby

Python

CSS

R

Based on the recent rise in mobile and Web development, JavaScript and Android skills are in high demand. JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as Angular, Knockout, Backbone, React and Ember are growing rapidly.

Mobile apps are growing at the fastest pace. Thus, there is the need of Android and iOS developers.

Conclusion

In this article, we saw the most popular and the highest-paying programming languages of 2016. It doesn’t matter what programming language you choose, most of the top programming languages are in demand, depending on the software, Application types, and usages. Your goal should be, not to worry about a language, but you can become an expert in any language, framework and the domain in which you work.

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