Highest Paying Programming Languages 2020: Perl, Go & Scala Dominate
Stack Overflow recently released a list of the highest paying programming languages in the industry. All aspiring programmers or developers looking for a switch want to choose a programming language that offers a good career graph both knowledge-wise and financially.
Thankfully, Stack Overflow gives a close estimate of actual salary figures for the highest paying programming languages used across the world.
The Developer Survey for 2020 by Stack Overflow is out now and it reveals that globally, respondents who use Perl, Scala, and Go tend to have the highest salaries. All three languages have a median salary of around $75,000.
What’s most interesting is that Perl, also ranks on the list of top most dreaded languages in 2020, securing the third position on it. But this may also be a reason why learning Perl has the most financial incentives. To compensate for the dearth of Perl developers, companies need to pay more in order to lure developers.
Here’s the complete list of the highest salaried programming languages of 2020.
| Position | Language | Median Salary (Global) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Perl | $76k |
| 2 | Scala | $76k |
| 3 | Go | $74k |
| 4 | Rust | $74k |
| 5 | Ruby | $71k |
| 6 | Bash/Shell/PowerShell | $65k |
| 7 | Objective-C | $64k |
| 8 | Haskell | $60k |
| 9 | Julia | $59k |
| 10 | Python | $59k |
| 11 | Swift | $58k |
| 12 | C# | $57k |
| 13 | R | $57k |
| 14 | TypeScript | $57k |
| 15 | Kotlin | $54k |
| 16 | SQL | $54k |
| 17 | Assembly | $53k |
| 18 | C++ | $53k |
| 19 | JavaScript | $53k |
| 20 | HTML/CSS | $52k |
| 21 | VBA | $51k |
| 22 | C | $50k |
| 23 | Java | $50k |
| 24 | PHP | $39k |
| 25 | Dart | $37k |
The most commonly used languages like Java, C, or PHP tend to score much lesser salaries. Once again, demand and supply can be quoted as the biggest factor here.
The above list has been determined on the basis of all the responses collected globally. When looking only at the US, Scala developers tend to have the highest salaries, followed by Go and Objective-C.
You can refer to the US median salary for different programming languages here.
