Now, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has collected data from ten sources that ranked programming languages based on several criterias’ to give one of the broadest rankings for programming languages till date. The top 10 most popular programming languages today, according to its findings, are C, Java, Python, C++, R, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go. IEEE comprised of data from Google searches, Hacker News, GitHub active repos, Twitter, GitHub trends, Reddit, Career Builder, Stack Overflow questions, IEEE Xplore, new GitHub projects, views on existing Stack Overflow questions, and Dice. However, it did not include data from a recent 11,000-strong Packt Publishing survey, which ranked Python, JavaScript, and Java as the most popular programming languages. The ranking list of IEEE is full of surprises, in which the most notable thing is where JavaScript is very lowly placed. Further, what is more surprising that the programming language ‘R’ features among the top 5, which is very hard to believe for a niche language that is used only in big data and statistical applications, and comes only across in the enterprise sectors. To top them all, is the fact that C is featuring as the top programming language in the ranking list of IEEE. The last two years has seen Java dominate the ranking, which is also consistent with the TIOBE index. Apple’s new Swift language was closely beaten by Google’s new programming language Go for the last position in the top ten. All the IEEE data is available online as an interactive infographic. For comparison sake, access to past rankings have been provided as well.
