Don’t Choose Your Main Programming Language Before Reading This
By: Gabriel Dias De Abreu
Tags: Programming Languages, Programming, Software Development, Stackoverflow, Stackoverflow Survey

Introduction

There are plenty of factors to consider when choosing a programming language to invest time and effort in and some uncertainties come up: “May I be admitted to some job position?”, “Is Salary going to be enough?”, “Will the Language die after a couple of months?”, and so on.

As we can figure out, this is a crucial decision that guides our career and impacts directly on our personal life then we might want to investigate who are already in these job positions and their choices.

Stack Overflow’s 2020 Survey provides us evidences about who is in these programming jobs. It is composed of 64461 answers from around the world containing the main programming language, Satisfaction, Salary, and online community engagement.

Programming Language impacts on the Job Satisfaction?

Here we can see Job Satisfaction from very satisfied to very unsatisfied. Languages are ordered from the biggest percentage of very satisfied developers to lower.

Developers working with Julia differ from Dart when answering very satisfied by 11%. Therefore, there is a clue that the language you work in is going to improve or diminish your work enjoyment.

One should think, so let me choose Julia as my main skill and I will be one of the most satisfied developers of 2020. But not so far, this is never so simple!

Which languages pay the biggest salaries and have more developers?

The chart below shows a comparison between the median salary and number of developers which indicates Julia has not the biggest median salary and not the biggest community. So if you are keen on choosing a language that pays better in median then Perl, Scala, Rust, and Go are well ranked among the most satisfied developer’s who work with a language.

But, these languages do not have such a considerable number of developers as Java, C, and Javascript which indicates more robust technologies and a larger community.

If you are interested in mastering a Programming Language you might want to be a valuable skill with a great community around.

How much are developers working with some language engaged in online communities?

We can see that languages with more developers have more community engagement and this can be an important factor in the long-term satisfaction of working on the technology.

Opportunities can emerge from this community and as more programmers work in a language more updated and rich the ecosystem around will be.

We can see that C, Java, and Javascript have the most developers who are in an online community. This is excellent to know once we might need help often with bugs and doubts.

It is important to notice that Python and Bash/Shell/Powershell are among those with high very satisfied rates, a high number of users, larger median salaries, and a big community.

Conclusion

This article provides us a glimpse of which programming languages from a general perspective are worth to invest time and effort considering the answers of the 2020 Stack Overflow survey.

Julia shows to be the language with a higher percentage of developers very satisfied but when we consider other variables such as salary and number of users it falls behind. C, Java, and Javascript shows to be languages with a high number of users and higher communities but with lower income and Job Satisfaction. Bash/Shell/Powershell and Python shows to be balanced languages in terms of number of users, satisfaction, and salary.

I expect these observations will improve your confidence to invest in mastering a Programming Language and help you to decide,

What is your main language and why?

To see more, see the link to Github available here.