The 10 Most In-Demand Coding and Programming Languages to Learn

The job market has seen many ups and downs over the last few years. But people who know how to code often have the best chances of weathering the storm. If you consider yourself someone who wants to learn this promising skill, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

There are countless coding bootcamps and online classes out there that promise a flashy new career, but which one is worth investing your time and money in? The number one consideration is aligning the coding language with the end goal or career you want. If you don’t know what you want to do yet or what your long-term goals are, you might find it hard to pick a coding language to learn.

While we can’t decide for you, hopefully, we can at least help narrow down the options.

Let’s start with the basics. For how advanced computers have become over the years, we still run into the same problem — that computers and humans don’t speak the same language. Computers understand binary, a series of zeros and ones. Trying to remember the difference between 10001 and 10011 can make a high school foreign language class look like a piece of cake. Programming languages serve as an intermediary between computers’ ones and zeros and our human language. Imagine it like this: Say, for example, you wanted to communicate with a German woman, but neither of you spoke the other’s respective language. However, then you realized you could both communicate by speaking Spanish.

Who It’s For: HTML and CSS provide the structure of websites and are essential knowledge for any web developer.

Key Features: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) provide the layout, spacing, colors, and fonts of websites. Overall, they provide the basic structures and allow developers to copy style aspects from one page to another so website pages have continuity. While not traditionally considered programming languages, they are required to make things appear on the web.

Companies That Use It: Every company that has a webpage

Choosing which programming language to learn can be daunting at first. What would you say if you had to guess how many programming languages are out there? Twenty? Two hundred?

According to the Online Historical Encyclopaedia of Programming Languages, there are actually about 8,945 coding languages. Many of these, though, are either not used very often or only in very specific contexts. If you are going to learn any programming language, there’s a good chance you will start with one of the 10 most popular.

Which programming language you should learn highly depends on your goals and interests. To help, check out a breakdown of some of the most popular jobs and their associated skills.

According to Payscale data, salaries for professionals with C++ programming skills average $93,000 a year as of December 2022. Payscale reports that Python developers earn an average of $79,400 a year as of November 2022. Location, experience, and the size of the company might influence salary more than the particular language. But, overall, C++ developers seem to earn slightly more than Python developers on average.

Absolutely. C++ is a popular language, so there are often many companies hiring C++ developers. Some employers may prefer that you have other technical skills, too. But having a good understanding of C++ can help you get a job as a programmer, software developer, quality analyst, game programmer, or C++ analyst.

Which language you should learn depends on your goals. Java is more useful for web, cloud, and Android app development. And Python is more useful for those working in data science, machine learning, and back-end development. If you want to learn both, it might be easier to start with Python, as it’s usually easier for people to pick up.

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