JavaScript has eclipsed Java as the most-learned language among developers, according to a report released week by technical recruiter HackerRank.
Based on an online survey of 71,281 developers done in November 2018, the 2019 HackerRank Developer Skills Report found that more than 73 percent of respondents had proficiency in JavaScript, an increase from nearly 68 percent in 2017. Slightly less than 71 percent reported proficiency in Java in 2018.
Following Java in 2018 were C at 62.84 percent, Python at 57.02 percent, and C++ at 55.77 percent. Python proficiency jumped considerably, increasing from 49.44 percent in 2017.
The survey identified Go and Kotlin as the languages most developers want to learn in 2019, with 37.2 percent wanting to learn Go (golang) and 26.545 wanting to learn Kotlin. These were followed by Python (26.14 percent), TypeScript (21.57 percent), and R (21.4 percent). Interest in Scala dropped, with just 20.86 percent saying they wanted to learn Scala, down from about 27 percent in 2018.
When it comes to which technologies developers believe will be the most-adopted in the next two years, the Internet of Things (IoT), at 53 percent, edged deep learning, at 50 percent. Following these were cloud machine learning at 41.43 percent, computer vision at 37.6 percent, and augmented or virtual reality at 33.62 percent.
Among development frameworks, Google’s Angular continues to be the most popular, with 33.5 percent of respondents reporting proficiency with it in 2018. But the React JavaScript UI framework jumped from 20 percent in 2017 to 25.77 percent in 2018. Slightly more popular was Spring, the Java framework, at 25.9 percent. In fourth and fifth place were Express at 19.87 percent and Microsoft’s ASP.Net at 18.55 percent.
As far as which frameworks developers want to learn in 2019, React leads the pack at 32.63 percent. Coincidence or not, proficiency with React was the most sought-after by hiring managers at 38.38 percent.
Badly written documentation was named the top pet peeve at work by junior developers, with 74.39 percent citing it as a problem. It was followed by spaghetti code (54.16 percent), everything being called a top priority (45.4 percent), estimates treated as deadlines (44.56 percent) and ghost bugs (51.5 percent). Senior developers, however, had spaghetti code (63.47 percent) outranking documentation (55.26 percent) as a pet peeve.