Posted on 09/04/2013 12:51:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
More than ever, companies need coders. And while tech firms do the bulk of the hiring, the demand for programmers spans industries and only seems to be growing.
From writing basic HTML to building complex logic into mobile applications, the ability to smartly craft lines of code continues to be one of the most in-demand — and often, well-paying — skill sets one can have.
(See also: Why This Guy Quit His Sports-Radio Dream Job... To Write Software)
So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for such data, but its very nature makes Indeed.com an ideal place to look. The job search site aggregates more than 16 million listings from a wide range of sources, so it's fairly comprehensive.
It may be almost 20 years old, but the object-oriented scripting language is still going strong. After existing for years as a general purpose programming language, Ruby got a huge bump from the advent of Ruby on Rails, the hyper-popular Web development framework. Since the rise of Rails, the two have practically become synonymous, but Ruby has plenty of applications as a general scripting language.
Microsoft's server-side Web development framework is more controversial than many of its peers, in part because it's a Microsoft product. Still, its ability to build dynamic sites and Web applications is favored by many programmers and, more importantly, the organizations who hire them.
AJAX is actually multiple technologies bundled into one. Asyncronous JavaScript and XML was first popularized by Web applications like Google Maps and Gmail. The ability of websites to retrieve data in the background without reloading the page is something we now take for granted, but it was groundbreaking stuff a decade ago. Today, using a conglomeration of HTML, CSS, JavaScript (or JSON) and XML to build asynchronous Web apps is still popular, and the job listings prove it.
For a 30-year-old programming language, Objective C is looking pretty good. It's the core of development for both of Apple's operating systems. Its roots in Mac OS X go back to Steve Jobs' days at NeXT and it's at the heart of iOS. Considering the the platform's enormous popularity, it's no wonder that Objective-C is coveted by employers across industries.
PHP is huge. The open source, server-side scripting language runs on more than 20 million websites and powers high-profile sites we deal with every day, including Facebook and Wikipedia. Any blog, news site or other website built using Wordpress or Drupal is making use of PHP as well. It's all over the Web, even if you can't see it by clicking "view source."
Python is a general purpose programming language that can be used in a variety of ways. Known for its clean and efficient code, Python is used by players as notable as Google and NASA. It's also what Dropbox is written in. In fact, the technology is so important to Dropbox that the company hired Python author Guido van Rossum away from Google late last year.
Dropbox isn't the only one hiring Python talent. There are currently 19,455 Python job listings on Indeed.com.
Perl was very popular in the 90s for its ability to create CGI scripts that beefed up the functionality of early Web pages. But the dynamic programming language — sometimes called the "Swiss Army chainsaw" of languages — is capable of a wide range of feats. In addition to Web development, it's used for things like system administration, building desktop apps, game development and even bioinformatics.
C has been around since the early 1970s and remains one of the most widely-used programming languages. It may lack the sexiness of the latest Web development frameworks, but C is what lots of operating systems, kernel level software and hardware drivers are made of.
Not to be confused with C or C++, C# is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft in 2000 to compete with Java. Programmers will debate the merits of one language versus the other until the end of time, but tyhe fact remains that employers are hiring C# programmers like crazy.
XML is everywhere. The markup language is used to define structured information in a wide variety of contexts. On the Web, it forms the basis of RSS and XHTML, it talks to databases and is paired with JavaScript for AJAX interactivity, among much else. It's even extended beyond the Web and has found its way into the heart of desktop applications like Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. The list goes on and on. And so do the job listings.
Like its predecessor C, C++ is used widely in operating systems, desktop apps, developing games, hardware drivers and much else. C++ has a reputation for being more complex and inefficient than some of the alternatives , but it is nonetheless an incredibly widely used and important programming language.
On the Web, JavaScript is what makes things interactive. This is especially true now that the rise of tablets and smartphones has bumped Flash from its once-prominent perch. Whether it's trendy frameworks like jQuery or the JSON data interchange standard, companies need JavaScript-focused talent like never before.
It's only natural that the language at the heart every Web page would be in high demand, even as native mobile app development and back-end cloud technologies command bigger ad bigger chunks of IT budgets. In fact, as tablets, smartphones and cloud-hosted services proliferate, the importance of the Web grows along with it. The conglomeration of Web technologies known as HTML5 is all the rage at the moment, but hypertext markup is more than a fad. It is, and will remain, the skeleton of the Web for the foreseeable future.
Java certainly has its critics, not to mention some well-publicized security issues. But the object-oriented language remains in heavy demand and used for a wide range of purposes. It can't possibly hurt that Google uses Java as the basis for Android application development, a sector that isn't likely to slowdown anytime soon.
NoSQL databases might be getting all the attention as of lately, but more traditional, structured databases are still going strong. Thus, SQL, the programming language for querying, manipulating and managing relational databases is in high demand. Considering the sheer volume of data being generated everyday, it's no shock that having the ability to help manage it is such a marketable skill. There are currently more than 98,000 SQL jobs indexed by Indeed.com.
I been developing Windows PC based automated testing systems for 20 some years now. Currently using Visual Studio 2010 and C#. Don’t see any changes coming on the horizon. If only Windows was a Real-Time OS.
One problem with .Net is that it only runs on Windows Server, with all the expense and headaches that entails.
One of the major advantages for Java is running on Linux and Unix, which are taking more and more of the server pie.
Ever hear of Mono?
I’d been intrigued by Mono when it was first being developed, but then work basically swamped me for a few years.
We have a split of .Net and Java/Unix, though I am on the Java side it is always good to keep up with other technologies. Learning Ruby this year, might start playing with Dart, but I could also see myself putting Mono on one of my Linux boxes.
What no RPG on the list??
I've been writing in Bash and Perl for the past 5 weeks... While I love it, parsing custom log files without any real standards can really wear you out!
Come on, give a dinosaur a break!
Actually, a friend is still gainfully employed doing FORTRAN programming.
except some who code in assembler
Puh-lease. I haven’t touched JCL in years but, Puh-lease. :-)
You think YOU cringe, try to imagine what it feels like when I am called to solve a coding problem / bug / feature with a minimum of four scripting languages (I hate to label it thus but since so many people use it; also including html) and they need someone who thinks in Assembly to figure out that they are misusing or multiple-writing to the same registry addy, among other things.
Or Dbase4?
I know Dbase4/FoxPro, BASIC, COBOL, Pascal and ForTran plus some HTML/CSS.
I am officially a dinosaur.
And you're not alone. For me it's Assembler, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, RPG, Perl, Bash, C, PHP, Expect/TCL, a little Python, Ruby, C# and gag me, some VB.
file DSN error
i last used RPG about 25 yrs ago
By a strange coincidence, so did I. Sometime around the Iranian Conflict, I believe... however coding was not involved at the time as near as I can recall.
Where is UML in this universe? It’s a pre-programming language.
“Ever hear of Mono?”
I sure have, but I’ve yet to run across a single web application that uses it. There’s a big difference between using Microsoft supported software on a Microsoft platform, and an open source implementation that only covers parts of the Windows package - also there is no standard web container for it. Plus, Mono generally underperforms Java so there’s nothing compelling there either.
I think it’s nice that Mono exists, as competition and choice are always good, but it’s a tiny fraction of Linux web development compared to the Java platform.
BTW I meant to mention that I share your appreciation of Scala. :-)
RE: Where is UML in this universe?
This list is only for PROGRAMMING languages. UML is a general-purpose modeling technique in the field of software engineering to to create visual models of object-oriented software-intensive systems.
It says “programming skills”.
XML and HTML are not programming languages, but rather markup languages used for data modeling. UML is used for modeling design solutions.
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