Rust earned the top spot as the “most-loved” programming language for the fifth consecutive year of Stack Overflow’s developer survey, while Python slipped from second place to third place, behind TypeScript.
Stack Overflow’s “most loved” languages are those with the highest percentage of survey respondents who currently use the language and want to continue using it. The company also surveyed developers about the languages they currently use but no longer want to use (“most dreaded”), the languages they currently don’t use but are most interested in using (“most wanted”), the languages that draw the highest salaries (“top paying”), and the languages most commonly used (“most popular”).
Announced May 27, 2020, the Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey polled nearly 65,000 developers worldwide in February. Here are the top 10 results in the aforementioned categories.
The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey’s top 10 “most loved” languages:
- Rust, 86.1 percent
- TypeScript, 67.1
- Python, 66.7
- Kotlin, 62.9
- Go, 62.3
- Julia, 62.2
- Dart, 62.1
- C#, 59.7
- Swift, 59.5
- JavaScript, 58.3
The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey’s top 10 “most dreaded” languages:
- Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), 80.4 percent
- Objective-C, 76.6
- Perl, 71.4
- Assembly, 70.6
- C, 66.9
- PHP, 62.7
- Ruby, 57.1
- C++, 56.6
- Java, 55.9
- R, 55.5
The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey’s top 10 “most wanted” languages:
- Python, 30 percent of respondents
- JavaScript, 18.5
- Go, 17.9
- TypeScript, 17.0
- Rust, 14.6
- Kotlin, 12.6
- Java, 8.8
- C++, 8.6
- SQL, 8.2
- C#, 7.3
The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey’s top 10 “most popular” technologies:
- JavaScript, 67.7 percent of all respondent
- HTML/CSS, 63.1
- SQL, 54.7
- Python, 44.1
- Java, 40.2
- Bash/Shell/PowerShell, 33.1
- C#, 31.4
- PHP, 26.2
- TypeScript, 25.4
- C++, 23.9
The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey’s top 10 “top paying” languages:
- Perl, $76,000
- Scala, $76,000
- Go, $74,000
- Rust, $74,000
- Ruby, $71,000
- Bash/Shell/PowerShell, $65,000
- Objective-C, $64,000
- Haskell, $60,000
- Julia, $59,000
- Python, $59,000
Stack Overflow reasoned that perhaps since Perl was also amongst the most-dreaded languages, it was possible the high salary was set to compensate for the dearth of developers who want to use Perl.
Stack Overflow also noted the survey was taken before the COVID-19 virus had impacted every nation worldwide and asked survey readers to keep this in mind when looking at the salary and job data. Last month Tiobe suggested that the C language, commonly used in medical equipment, could be gathering more interest as a result of the pandemic. Python and R, used in data science, also might draw more interest due to the virus.