JavaScript Is The Most Popular Programming Language: Stack Overflow Survey

Developers and programming enthusiasts eagerly await the results of the annual Stack Overflow survey every year. It’s the world’s largest and most comprehensive survey to involve programmers and their preferences. The 2019 edition of this survey touched about 90,000 developers and the results are finally here.

In this article, I’ll be particularly focusing on the most popular programming languages and technologies being used today. This will be followed by a series of other articles in the upcoming days that’ll discuss other aspects of the survey.

25 Most popular programming languages/technologies

Before we begin, it’s important to highlight that Stack Overflow has taken more steps to represent the developer community across the world in an even manner. On some occasions, survey weighting has been used to take care of the unavoidable demographic skew.

When it comes to programming languages and their usage, JavaScript has turned out to be the most popular with about 67.8% respondents using it. JS is followed by Python, which is used by 41.7% coders. It’s interesting to note that Python was able to beat Java by just a margin of 0.6%.

If we also consider scripting and markup languages, then HTML/CSS grab the second spot with 63.5% voters using them, followed by SQL at #3 with 54.4% votes.

Programming, Scripting, and Markup Languages	% Users
JavaScript	69.70%
HTML/CSS	63.10%
SQL	56.50%
Python	39.40%
Java	39.20%
Bash/Shell/PowerShell	37.90%
C#	31.90%
PHP	25.80%
TypeScript	23.50%
C++	20.40%
C	17.30%
Ruby	8.90%
Go	8.80%
Swift	6.80%
Kotlin	6.60%
R	5.60%
VBA	5.50%
Objective-C	5.20%
Assembly	5.00%
Scala	4.20%
Rust	3.00%
Dart	1.80%
Elixir	1.60%
Clojure	1.50%
WebAssembly	1.10%

In case you found the results of this survey interesting or use these programming languages and technologies often, do tell us in the comments section.

Keep reading, keep coding!