What computer programming languages do you know?

The School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering celebrates computer programmers worldwide by observing “International Programmer’s Day”, which occurs on the 13th September 2021. International Programmer’s Day celebrates how programmers have made a positive impact to everyday lives. The day is celebrated on 13th September because it is 256 days into the year. The value 256 was chosen because it is the quantity of values that can be represented by an eight-bit byte.

Dr Dave Perkins (Senior Lecturer in Computer Science) added “I would like say ‘Happy Programmer’s Day’ to all programmers everywhere”. Dave went on to say “the quantity of jobs that require computer knowledge and programming skills is growing every year. We, at Bangor University, are delighted to deliver a range of courses that teach different programming languages. We teach JavaScript, Java, C++. Python, Matlab, R, to name a few languages.”

The popularity of programming languages has changed over the past years. Professor Jonathan Roberts (Professor in Visualisation) said “When I started at University as an undergraduate student in Computer Science, I studied Pascal, C and Haskell. While C and Haskell are still popular Pascal is less so. The popularity of languages change over the years. It is clear, because of the ubiquity of the Internet, that JavaScript and HTML/CSS are popular today.” Stackoverflow, a popular community space, runs an annual survey. Their data from over 65 thousand participants offers an insight into programming languages and other computing and technological advances. Professor Roberts went on to say “It is interesting looking at the popularity of computing languages over the past five years. It is dominated by five: JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python, SQL and Java. But shell scripting, C#, C++, PHP, TypeScript are also very popular.”

The most popular computing languages of 2021. Data from stackoverflow.com

Professor Roberts went on to say “By looking at the past five years we get a brief snapshot of what is happening. While JavaScript has wavered in popularity, it is still by far the most popular language. But languages such as Python and TypeScript are gaining in popularity, and the C variants (C, C++, C#) are also very popular.

 

Trend visualisations of some of the popular languages. Data from stackoverflow.com

Publication date: 13 September 2021