Which programming languages will grow the most over the next two years? While it’s impossible to predict the future, we can certainly make an educated guess based on data—and the answer might not align with your expectations.
Emsi Burning Glass collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country. As part of that analysis, it predicts how certain skills (and programming languages) will grow or decline in usage within companies. Here’s what the platform said about the potential growth rates for some of the country’s most popular programming languages:
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Python (which recently seized the top position on the TIOBE Index’s long-running list of the world’s most buzzed-about programming languages) is predicted to gain substantially over the next two years. Long popular as a generalist language, Python has been making substantial inroads lately into highly specialized arenas such as data science and machine learning. But the real standout here is TypeScript, which Emsi Burning Glass thinks will grow an eye-watering 140 percent over the next two years.
What’s potentially behind that stunning rise? TypeScript is a superset of the ultra-popular JavaScript (which has led rise to significant debates over whether TypeScript is actually a “full” programming language). It’s also widely beloved by technologists: In the 2020 edition of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, some 86.1 percent of surveyed developers said that Rust was a language they loved, followed by TypeScript (67.1 percent), Python (66.7 percent), Kotlin (62.9 percent), and Go (62.3 percent).
“TypeScript’s surge in popularity highlights Microsoft’s change of direction and embrace of the open source movement,” Stack Overflow added at the time. “As front-end web and Node.JS codebases grow in size and complexity, adopting TypeScript’s static typing gives developers increased confidence in their code’s correctness.”
TypeScript recently hit version 4.0, with new features including labeled tuple elements, speed improvements, and custom JSX factories. While none of the features in the latest version are “huge,” they do contribute to the language’s stability, potentially making it even more enticing for developers to utilize it.
How will TypeScript’s rise impact JavaScript usage? Given JavaScript’s massive legacy codebase and popularity, it seems unlikely that anything will significantly impact it anytime soon. But if you’re interested in anything JavaScript-related, you should add TypeScript to your learning schedule.
