Top Programming Languages to Learn in 2020

Key Takeaways

hello everybody and welcome back so in this video what I'm going to be doing is sharing with you my top five picks for the best programming language to learn in 2020 now before we get into those picks I want to quickly discuss the criteria that I've used to decide these and to rank these different languages now the first thing that I always consider when I look at a programming language is how mainstream or well-known this language is how well-established is it is it stable has it been around for a long time now obviously more newer languages or languages that have just come out can't really win on this front but I think it's something that's important to consider to make sure that you're going to learn a language that is going to be around for a long time the next thing that I like to look at is popularity so not just in terms of how many people are using the language but is it being learned more and more day by day are more people looking it up are less people looking at the language it's something to consider and languages that are growing in popularity are obviously going to be favorable for us to want to learn for the future the next thing is going to be the tools frameworks and libraries that come with this language there that have been built off of this language that's very important that's some of the reasons why some of the languages that are on our list are there is because of the amazing frameworks that come with them and what it allows you to do with the language itself next we're gonna get into a little bit about the job market so you know how many jobs are there for this specific position and what is the average salary look like for ones that we can actually find the statistics for and then finally what is learning this language actually going to do for you so not just for a company that wants to hire you or for getting paid what is this gonna do for your professional and skill development and is this gonna help you possibly learn another language in the future and become a better programmer I think that's something a lot of people skim over and that's a point that I'm gonna try to make a lot through this video is what this language will actually do for you as a programmer and allow you to move on towards you know in your future career or future programming experience so with that being said let's get into my top 5 picks for the best programming language to learn in 2020 before we get started I need to thank simply learn for sponsoring this video and introducing all of us to the whole stack web developer course called the mean stack master's program in this course you'll master back-end and front-end JavaScript technologies using MongoDB Express angular and know AAS you learn tools and skills like node packet manager sqlite3 typescript bootstrap and many others you'll gain in-depth knowledge of no SQL principles like data modeling and ingestion and work on seven real-life industry based projects you'll build dynamic and interact web pages using HTML and CSS and be able to pick between electives like react Jas and docker compose start mastering web development today by hitting the link in the description and signing up for the mean stack masters program so coming in at pick number five I have C and C++ now I've grouped these languages together because I believe they're similar enough that we can talk about them in the same category for this video and when we're talking about languages being well established and mainstream I would say there's no better example than that then C and C++ now C and C++ are some of the most well established languages that exist they're used by millions of different developers across millions of different organizations around the world and they've been around for such a long time that there's amazing community behind these languages and tons of different resources online to be able to learn them now when it comes to the popularity of this language or these languages I would say it's been decreasing as the years go on but the reason for that would likely be that new beginners picking up new programming languages in the past few years wouldn't really be introduced to C or C++ as their first language and therefore there's less people learning it that doesn't mean that there's less jobs and that it's less in demand in fact looking at the job market for C and C++ we can see that it stayed fairly stable over the past few years and although there's not a massive surge and boom and these kind of jobs with developing and C and C++ they're not they don't look to be going anywhere just because so many organizations use this as their core code for a lot of their systems and that again is because C and C++ is super fast it's super capable there's nothing that you can't really do if you know C or C++ and this brings me into my last point which is learning C and C++ is only gonna make you a better programmer even if you're not looking to do this as your career or your job I would definitely recommend looking into it or at least you know getting a general idea what it's like to program in C and C++ because it's much different than a lot of these hireling that we see today and learning to use something like this just makes you a much better programmer finally the salary the average salary of a C++ developer in the United States here is listed at a hundred six thousand US dollars I'm going to be using indeed for all of these salary kind of insights or averages these are gonna change and vary depending on where you're located your age your amount of experience and all of that but this is what the average I'm getting is from indeed so anyways that's my pick number five C and C++ so coming in at pick number four I have Java now Java is also a very well-established programming language it's been around for a very long time it's trusted it's reliable and it's used for very large complex systems which we can't say about a lot of the other languages that I'll be mentioning later on now Java is a great language a lot of people seem to think that it's been dying down in popularity I wouldn't necessarily agree with that I think it's been staying fairly level if not increasing a slight amount the reason a lot of people seem to think that Java is dying is because a lot of these other newer programming languages are so kind of surpassing it in the ranks but that doesn't mean that Java is not still used by millions of different organizations around the world and has one of the largest code bases on github so I believe it's actually ranked the third or the fourth most contributed code on github something around the line so that someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that and there's a ton of open-source api's and libraries for Java so this essentially means that you can do pretty much anything with Java code as well I wouldn't say it's as capable and flexible as something like C or C++ but when it comes to building out large-scale systems job is a great option for that and it's not as complex and difficult to learn as a language like C or C++ it also runs on the JVM which means that you can scale this to pretty much any device or platform you want you can run this on a server you can run this on iOS you can put this on you know pretty much anything you want right you can make that stuff applications and when it comes to the job market there's so many jobs in Java development because this is what so many companies have been trusting and using since they've been founded or since they even existed as their core technology so knowing Java you will most likely be able to get a job and I believe the average salary of a Java developer is 90,000 now one of the reasons I like telling people to learn Java is if they're coming from a background say like Python or a scripting language or something that's not statically typed moving to a statically typed language and learning Java it's not that difficult a lot of the syntax is similar to something you've seen before but it really shows you how important structure in your code can be and allows you to get a really good kind of fundamentals and understanding of object-oriented design so I think it's a great language to learn in 2020 especially if you're someone who's only been doing scripting languages beforehand so the next language on my list coming in at rank number three is go otherwise known as golang now for those of you that don't know much about Go Go is a statically typed compiled language that's built on a functional programming paradigm now what that means is there's actually no object orientated programming or style even built into the language go you can kind of try to simulate it but instead of using objects and classes and actually use something called Struck's now--go is actually built around concurrent programming so making concurrency really easy to implement into the program and I almost like to compare it to almost a high-performance version of Python so the language itself is actually very simple it's a pretty small in comparison like if we're looking at the amount of keywords and just the amount of features built into the language itself but it's very very powerful and building high performance almost scripts very quickly is something that go is really good at so that's the way I like to the way you can kind of think about go is a high-performance version of Python it does a lot of similar things that Python will be able to do like it does some web development stuff some enterprise applications you can pretty much do anything you want with go as well and since it's compiled that means it's pretty easy to transfer your go applications to different computers now in terms of being well established I would say go is probably a little bit away from getting to that point there's not a huge community around at least from what I've seen on the internet myself doing some research and I think in the next few years we're gonna see grow go continue to rise in popularity may become one of the mainstream languages now right now in terms of popularity go has been kind of booming and just skyrocketing over the past few years more people have been learning about it figuring out what it does and you know falling in love with NGO the language itself so that's why I've ranked it at number three here I can see in the next maybe five ten years actually probably a little bit shorter than that go becoming one of the next mean stream languages I think it's really powerful it's really interesting and learning it is gonna show you a different style of programming that you've probably never been introduced to before in terms of average salary and jobs those figures are hard to determine just because this language is so new so I'm gonna stick from not telling you anything about them as I don't want to mislead anyone but I would definitely recommend at least looking into go and considering learning it as your next language in 2020 and coming in at number 2 we have JavaScript now I'm sure this is no surprise to any of you but JavaScript back in the day I would say maybe you know seven eight years ago was really not nearly as big as it was today it was something that was just used for kind of front-end web development work a lot of developers almost ridiculed JavaScript and we're like you know it's a horrible language personally when I started learning JavaScript when I was about that age you know eight years ago I didn't find it that useful but now with all of these new frameworks being invented for it something like you know react vous angular nodejs it's turned JavaScript from something that was just a great front-end web development language into a great multi-purpose programming language and now learning JavaScript not only can you do front-end web development but you can also do backend work you can do full stack you can do stuff with um you know client-server architectures you can go crazy with what you're gonna do with JavaScript because of all the things that have been invented recently for it now github is actually ranked JavaScript as the number one most contributed code for the past five years the average salary of a JavaScript developer in the u.s. is actually 114 thousand US dollars and there is a ton and increasing amount of jobs for javascript and it just seems like overall a great language to learn in 2020 it's pretty simple it you can learn it you know honestly I would say in a week or two especially if you're an experienced developer and becoming kind of a master at javascript now just means you can do so much more with your career and with the language in general and that's why I've put this language out number two I don't think I need to say much more about it you guys know how awesome javascript is now in 2020 and I think for anyone that wants to get a into the web development game or get a quick entry into programming that learning JavaScript is probably be one of your best bets so my number one pick for the best programming language to learn in 2020 is going to have to go to Python now I do have a slight bias here as my entire channel is pretty much based on Python and that's what I you know my kind of bread and butter is but despite that Python was actually ranked the fastest growing programming language according to github last year and also is the second most popular programming language based on code contributions on github and it's just in a really amazing language and tool to have under your belt as a developer it's great at doing so many different things from so many different domains no it might not be the best tool for every single project that you're gonna be working on but chances are if you know Python you need to do something you will be able to do that in Python there's a pretty well infinite amount of libraries and modules for Python code which allow you to do things like make games make websites desktop applications iOS applications Android apps you name it you can likely do it with Python and it's a really great language to get into and to learn especially if you're a beginner it's something that's so simple and just very easy to use but yet extremely powerful and that's one of the reasons that I recommend it as my top choice in my top programming language to learn in 2020 now other than that the average salary of a Python developer in the US and this is the highest on the list so far is a hundred and twenty thousand US dollars annually and the amount of jobs for Python related work has been increasing steadily over the past few years and this year alone I think there was an increase of something like fifteen thousand jobs in the United States which is actually a substantial amount so Python is a great language again it's a general-purpose programming language there's nothing you really can't do with it and in terms of building a strong foundation learning Python is really gonna help you do that and it's gonna give you almost an appreciation for the simplicity built into the language versus some other languages that are more complex again like C++ so with that being said that has been my top 5 picks for the best programming languages to learn in 2020 do you agree with me do you horribly disagree let me know in the comments down below let's have a little about it with that being said I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did leave a like subscribe to the channel and I will see you in another one