We saw several new programming languages like Kotlin, Rust, and Go lang come into promienence this year. In this article, we take a look at what 2018 has in store when it comes to programming languages.

What will be the most in-demand programming language of 2018?

Go lang is likely to be in high demand next year. The language backed by Google has been gaining popularity and mindshare of developers steadily and is increasingly being used for enterprise software development.

What’s driving the demand for this skill?

Unfortunately, there is no technical reason for the demand for Go lang. The language itself has several notable shortcoming including lack of generics. It does have a simple syntax and is considered relatively easy to work with for novice developers. Google’s backing has a big role to play in the popularity of Go lang. It is replacing C as the language of choice for building system software and several popular open source projects like docker, kubernetes etc. are written in Go lang.

What other languages will be popular in 2018?

Another language to watch out in 2018 is going to be Kotlin. It is a language based on JVM created by JetBrains the creators of popular IDE IntelliJ. Kotlin is now fully supported on android and is likely to become the language of choice for building android applications. It also allows developers to use the existing ecosystem of Java libraries and components which aids in its adoption.

What’s increasing the demand for these languages?

Historically demand for programming languages has been driven more by fad and popularity than actual technical merit. Every few years we seem to go through a wave of new languages that gain popularity. It helps if the language is backed by a major company like Google. We have seen this pattern for demand and popularity repeat with Ruby, Node.js and now Go lang.

Which languages are likely to become less sought after in 2018?

PHP is going to continue its decline towards irrelevance and thankfully so. The language has been marred with security issues since the beginning and there are many better alternatives to choose from. The rising popularity of Go lang is going to hurt Ruby in 2018 as developers move to Go for building web applications and services.