IEEE Spectrum’s 2022 programming language rankings are now available. The list is published once a year, and this year is the ninth year. This list improves and simplifies the interactive ranking tool and makes other changes internally; but overall it still combines multiple metrics from different sources to estimate the relative popularity of different languages.

Python remains at the top of the list, followed by C. But the announcement points to the fact that the combined popularity of C and large C-like languages ​​(C++ and C#) has surpassed Python to some extent. Java and Javascript also remain popular, the latter driven by the increasing sophistication of websites and in-browser tools.

At the same time, SQL’s popularity is on the rise, and it has taken the number one spot in the list’s Jobs ranking (which only focuses on metrics from IEEEJob Site and CareerBuilder).After reviewing a large number of job listings during the research process, the researchers believe that SQL’s popularity is not due to many employersOnlySQL coders are needed, but they want candidates who can master a specific language and master SQL at the same time.

“And a lot of them want to add SQL…it’s probably not the most glamorous language, and it’s not the language you’re going to use to implement the next great algorithm, but having some SQL experience can give you more Valuable opportunities to choose from.”

Job listings is not the only indicator that the IEEE Spectrum list focuses on. It focuses on nine indicators in total. Resources include GitHub, Google, Stack Overflow, Twitter, and IEEE Xplore. The raw data is normalized and weighted according to the different rankings provided, for example, Spectrum’s default ranking is heavily weighted towards the interests of IEEE members, while Trending places more emphasis on forum and social media metrics.A full list of relevant sources can be found athereCheck.

Previously,IEEE Spectrum once provided an option that allows readers to choose the weights of parameter combinations and get different sorting results. But in fact, the utilization of this feature is not high; for now they have removed this feature, allowing to pre-compute preset rankings, instead of providing an application with all the metric data, and then calculating it on the fly in the browser ranking.

It is worth mentioning that there are often many controversial issues involved in such rankings; among them, the division of programming languages, such as HTML/CSS, is a very controversial option. But IEEE Spectrum believes that HTML/CSS in general is really a programming language; because tags in its source code are mainly used to perform tasks such as “present this text in a table format” or “make this heading larger than the body text” “.

There is also the question of how to decide that a superset or subset of a language has become unique enough to be considered in isolation? In this regard, IEEE Spectrum is mainly based on pragmatism.

“You could argue that Arduino microcontrollers are programmed in a subset of Java (or C++), but if someone is looking for help writing an Arduino project, giving them a book on Java is of limited use. On the other hand, there are many books with titles like Writing Arduino Programs Made EZ, so the Arduino language is listed separately. On the other hand, putting MicroPython and CircuitPython in the Python box doesn’t seem to make much sense, at least for now. Categories are constantly evolving. For example, we previously combined Typescript with JavaScript, but adoption has grown enough that it makes more sense to split it out.“

Complete ranking information can be viewed on the IEEE Spectrum official website.