Coding, Cash, and Consistency
It’s a pretty romanticized story – a kid with a fondness for video games and technology develops an interest in computer science, going on to attend a prestigious university and become a software engineer. Perhaps he or she will come up with a groundbreaking innovation during the process and start a company of their own to be CEO of.
Such dreams are what fuels thousands of students to learn how to program, whether that is at five years of age or twenty five. Where should they begin? By learning some obscure language advertised by self-learning websites as “educational” and “beginner-friendly”, or one that is utilized by billions of devices and demanded by employers at Fortune 500 companies?
The software industry is no stranger to this “rich get richer” phenomenon. Year after year, the same familiar programming languages consistently appear in “Top 7 Most In-Demand Programming Languages” articles, the likes of which include Java, Python, c++, and PHP. While new languages, frameworks, and technology may arise to fame, they can be counted on to fade within a few years. This may seem odd at first glance; with over 600 unique programming languages, surely a few of them could outperform these decades-old languages in efficiency and user-friendliness, at least for specific tasks.
The fact lies in that they simply aren’t able to compete with the popularity of established languages. Sure, Erlang may allow someone to run 20 million processes at the same time on a Web server, but what is the use if adopting it requires complications avoidable with a more well known language, or if it makes implementing necessary functions more of a hassle?
Popular languages are just that because of their functionality from the many libraries and packages that users have created for them. As a result, programmers are more likely to use the language and add additional libraries that make it even more attractive. In this sense, “rich” languages only get “richer” in usability.
The way that many “Top 10” articles rank languages only contributes to this phenomenon as well. They often use the breadth of sectors that a language is used in or number of job postings for each to determine which are most desired by companies, incentivizing people to learn these coding languages and further snowballing their use. Learning languages not used by many companies means risking becoming irrelevant as a developer.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t any benefits to learning less mainstream languages, even if they aren’t the fast track to earning cash – just remember that those introductory programming classes are overfilled every semester for good reason.
https://www.mondo.com/blog-in-demand-programming-languages-2018/
https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/7-most-in-demand-programming-languages-of-2018/