Stack Overflow Survey: Rust remains ‘most loved’ programming language
Stack Overflow has released the results of its annual survey of developers, students and researchers. This shows that Rust is still the ‘most popular’ programming language, followed by Kotlin.
According to Stack Overflow, this is the third year in a row that Rust has topped the rankings in the “Most Liked” category. This category consists of languages that respondents say they work with and are interested in continuing to use the languages in the future. This edition was the first to ask about the Kotlin language, which promptly came in second.
This JVM language from 2011 thus replaces Smalltalk last year. However, that language is nowhere to be seen in the current results. Python is in third place this year and has moved up three places compared to last year. Among the wanted languages, this one is number one, just like last time, followed again by javascript and Go.
The ‘most feared languages’ are also part of the survey again, ie the languages developers are working with now and want to stop. Visual Basic 6 is still in the lead there, followed this year by newcomer Cobol and Coffeescript. Cobol has taken the place where VBA stood last time.
Stack Overflow further reports that machine learning is a major trend and also raised a number of questions about artificial intelligence. The most popular answer to the ‘dangers of artificial intelligence’ was that AI will make important decisions, followed by the surpassing of human intelligence and a changed definition of fairness in decisions made by an algorithm versus a human. On the other hand, respondents found the idea that AI is increasingly automating work was the most exciting prospect.
It can be concluded from the other answers that developers believe they are responsible for estimating the consequences of AI, more than the government or other institutions. In general, the respondents indicated that they saw more in the possibilities of artificial intelligence than in the dangers. This year there were 100,000 participants in the survey; last year there were 64,000.