Main image of article 10 Most Popular Programming Languages: How Much Do They Pay?

What are the most popular programming languages, and how much do they pay? The answers to those questions can give technologists some crucial insight as they try to figure out which languages to learn next.

Emsi Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country, has a breakdown of the programming languages that appeared most in those postings over the past 90 days; in addition, it has the median salaries for those languages. Take a look:

The Emsi Burning Glass list echoes (but doesn’t fully replicate) the recent programming-language rankings generated by IEEE Spectrum, which derived its list via 11 metrics from eight sources, including Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Twitter (in theory, this offers insight into not only a language’s usage, but also its buzz). 

Based on this data, we can conclude that not only are these programming languages popular among employers, and pay high salaries, but they likely won’t fade away for quite some time—they’re too well-used, even outside a corporate context, and they continue to generate lots of discussion.

What else can we conclude from this data? All of these languages pay really well, and they’re all really popular among employers, but popularity doesn’t totally correlate with salary—for example, Ruby pays a bit more than JavaScript, despite its position further down the list. From a career perspective, you can’t go wrong by learning any of these—the biggest question is what you want to do with a particular language once you learn it. Whether you want to break into mobile or PC programming or IoT (Internet of Things), for example, can have a huge impact on the languages you choose to focus on.