Rating of programming languages. Who is the best programmer in the world? Which programming language to choose to learn
Among the townsfolk, programmers are now a respected profession. After all, without them there would be no iPhones and Facebook, they create cool companies and they are among the few that are pegged to the dollar in Ukraine. And who is popular directly among IT specialists? VentureBeat is a list of legendary programmers who enjoy the greatest authority in the global IT community.
Linus Torvalds created Linux, a free operating system, in a dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, Linux runs data centers and supercomputers, and is developed by a horde of freeware fans around the world.
Torvalds is known, in particular, for the fact that he does not go into his pocket for a word and does not try to please the public. At one of his recent speeches, when asked from the audience if he scares off members of the Linux community with his manner of communication, he replied: "I don't give a damn about you." About Torvalds among developers there are the same jokes as among the townsfolk about Chuck Norris. For example, Torvalds can divide by zero and play 3D games, executing their source code in real time in his mind.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee- the only one on this list who managed to earn a knighthood - he was knighted by the British Queen Elizabeth II. He is the creator of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the technology on which the entire Internet is built.
He now leads the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a non-profit organization supported by Google, Facebook and Microsoft, dedicated to making broadband accessible to people around the world.
Donald Knuth. His academic work in computer science has earned him the title of "father of algorithm analysis". Everything on the web, from Facebook's feed selection algorithm to Amazon's similar product selection algorithm, owes something to it. He is already 77, but he still works. He is currently writing a book called The Art of Computer Programming. He is also an honorary professor at Stanford.
Brendan Icke, creator of the JavaScript programming language, which is the de facto standard for web programming. Participated in the creation of Mozilla, the company that develops the Firefox browser. Resigned as CEO when it became known about his material support of the project to ban gay marriage in California.
Solomon Hykes, creator of Docker, a technology that developers love because it packages code into containers and delivers it to servers. Works like a virtual machine, but much faster. Docker started out as a side project at dotCloud, but when it turned out to be a popular product, the company went through a pivot and soon became a unicorn.
Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook. that the smaller and more flexible the team, the more successful it will work. The billionth social network is served by "only" 10,000 people around the world.
David Heinemeier Hansson, known as DHH. Founder of Ruby on Rails, the super popular framework that earned him the title and Google Hacker of the Year award in 2005.
Richard Stallman, known primarily for the fight for free software, the founder of GNU, the author of the idea of "copyleft" - as opposed to copyright. Very principled, does not use any proprietary developments.
Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, which gave users the ability to download files super fast. BitTorrent is incredibly popular, with a modest estimate of 250 million users worldwide. Last year, Thom Yorke tried to distribute the album exclusively through BitTorrent. And yet, the possibilities of BitTorrent were first of all appreciated by Internet pirates.
James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language. But you already know this. What you may not know is that James of the famous Ukrainian startup Jelastic is an independent director.
Bjorn Stroustrup, Danish programmer. In 1978, he created the C++ programming language, improving on C. He is still actively working: he teaches at the University of Texas A&M, Columbia University, and is also employed at Morgan Stanley.
John Carmack, co-founder of id Software. All over the world he is known as the creator of Doom. Incidentally, the idea for the game was born during a D&D party that the team had been holding regularly at id Software headquarters for several years. And the game master has always been John. He was the first to try out the tricks of 3D graphics that are still used today.
Now he is employed by Oculus VR, which is worth $2 billion.
Many people who are not related to the IT field, at the beginning of their journey, think about the topic: what programming language to learn? After all, there are a lot of languages, about a thousand. However, there is no single correct answer to the question of which programming language is best. Each language was created to solve specific problems. Over time, some of them have lost relevance, respectively, these languages have faded into the background. The leading positions were occupied by languages that meet the needs of large corporations, businesses engaged in activities on the Internet platform. To find out the demand for a language in the IT technology market, as well as to simplify the task of choosing for yourself, if you decide to start programming, ratings of programming languages will help you.
What is a rating?
Programming language rating is a measure of his popularity, determined on the basis of one or more criteria. For example, the language queries of users on the Internet, the number of downloaded software, the number of forum discussions, the number of vacancies in the market. For example, here is how you can calculate the Java rating among the four languages based on user requests on the Internet:
Where n is the number of user queries by language on the Internet.
What are the ratings?
The rating does not answer the question of which programming language is better; rather, it characterizes the popularity of its use. Below are ratings from various companies that have been monitoring the popularity of programming languages for a long time. Company rating TIOBE Software(Fig. 1). The analysis of ranking results includes data based on the search results of 25 major search engines, including Google, Ebay, YouTube, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, Bing.
We analyze ratings and narrow the search
What conclusions can be drawn from these rankings? Despite some differences in the distribution of language places, the leaders are Java, JavaScript, Python, C. It is these four languages that occupy about 60% of the total use of programming languages in the world. Therefore, by choosing one of them, you will be in the trend of technology.We study the "candidates" closer
So what programming language to learn, if you choose from these four? To decide, you need to take into account several important points.
If you want to make money by programming, and to be treated like a serious developer, take a look at Java and the C family of languages. By learning one of these languages, you will master the basic concepts and fundamentals of programming necessary for any programmer: variables, types, return values, methods, functions, expressions, initialization and life cycle, algorithms, input / output streams. C++ is worth learning if you want to, for example, write various application programs or games. C is closer to the hardware and is used for low-level programming. Suitable, for example, for writing drivers and operating systems. The C# language was created in the image and likeness of Java, only with a syntax even closer to C++ and is used primarily for developing software products for the NET.Framework and Windows platforms. As for Java, it has established itself as a fast (Fig. 7), reliable and platform-independent language, which makes it the best programming language for developing enterprise applications - enterprise-wide applications. Java has been a leader in the job market for programmers for a long time. This is evidenced by the results of monitoring vacancies from IEEE Spectrum for the last 4 years, as well as data from Indeed : 
The Java language was created to simplify the work of programmers and reduce the requirements for their skills, so it is easier and more "fail safe" to use than C and C++. To properly program in C or C++, you need to have a fairly high qualification, since these languages have the ability to use low-level programming tools. With an insufficient level of knowledge, the likelihood of writing insecure and obfuscated code that is difficult to debug using these languages is much higher than in Java. Java is an easy-to-learn language that can be mastered “without leaving home” thanks to the huge amount of material on the Internet and various online learning resources, so I advise you to take a closer look at it as the first language to learn. Thanks to the existence of forums such as StackOverFlow, Javatalks, and Cyberforum, when learning Java, you can easily find the answer to any question on the topic of programming. In addition, Java developers are among the highest paid programmers. You can read more about this.
Let's summarize
So, if you have not yet decided on the first language to learn, follow these steps:- Think about what you would like to do in the future (web development, development of applications and software for games, mobile development, development of server-side enterprise applications)
- View two or three major language rankings, review the popularity of languages on the Internet
- Explore the job and salary market in your area (for example, on job search sites)
- Estimate your strengths and time that you can devote to learning programming
Java is the best choice
Why is Java the best programming language for the vast majority of beginners?- Knowing Java, with a high degree of probability you will be engaged in the development of enterprise applications. This work is well paid, because the customers are corporations, banks and large business players.
- Knowledge of Java gives you the opportunity to engage in promising, actively developing and well-paid mobile application development.
- The vast majority of running enterprise server applications in the world are written in Java, so the language, even in the most pessimistic scenario, will be supported for many more years.
- For many years, Java has been leading in terms of the number of vacancies. Often employers are large companies, and it is easier for a junu to develop in a large company than in a small one.
- Java is quite easy to learn. Having mastered it, you will master the fundamentals of programming, necessary for any programmer. At the same time, after it it is very easy to learn JavaScript or Python and it is much easier to approach relatively complex C ++.
- The Java language is easier to use than the languages of the C family. At the same time, knowledge of Java allows you to rightly be considered a professional developer.
- Last but not least, Java development pays well.
According to HackerRank, a platform with a million and a half audience where programmers compete in solving problems, in 2017 Russia ranked second after China in the ranking of the strongest programmers and holds the absolute leadership in the development of algorithms. But the most impressive results are shown by Russian students who smash everyone to smithereens at international olympiads and championships.
Since 2000, Russia has won 32 gold medals at the ICPC International Student Programming Championship, far ahead of China with 13 medals and the US with six.
What makes Russian IT specialists in demand and successful?
"LITMO-1" (1958) was the first universal electronic digital machine for engineering calculations, contained 850 electron tubes, performed 100 operations per second and had 2048 bytes of memory.
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Continuity
Modern Russia inherited a strong mathematical school from the Soviet Union. Soviet scientists made revolutionary breakthroughs in the technical and natural sciences - just remember the names of Pyotr Kapitsa, Igor Kurchatov, Lev Landau.
After the collapse of the USSR in the nineties, IT specialists were in great demand. Programming was almost the only professional field in which one could earn money. It is easy for a well-versed mathematician to learn programming, because computer science is a practical application of mathematics. Therefore, informatics in Russia, albeit belatedly, has also become a developed area of science and practice.
Smarties from school
Russian schoolchildren have been solving many problems since the primary grades, in which several steps must be kept in mind at once. A handicap for our students is also given by the ban on the use of a calculator in lessons and olympiads. In France and the USA, it is allowed to simplify your calculations from the third grade.
In addition, our schoolchildren begin to operate with abstract concepts quite early. For example, we already have polynomials in high school. Numbers are an imaginable concept, but (a + b) 2 is much more difficult to comprehend. This requires the skill of abstract thinking.
Russia also has a well-developed system of special schools, lyceums with a specialization in physics and mathematics, division into specializations in the senior classes. The Olympics help to select and send talented children to the best universities in the country from the school bench. Passing the stages of the All-Russian Olympiad for schoolchildren, students train on difficult tasks and gain experience in competing with the best of the best. As a result, already at the school stage of the International Olympiads in Informatics and Physics, Russian children show outstanding results.
Everyone who is fond of sports programming is well aware of the name of Gennady Korotkevich. He is the most titled Olympiad programmer in the world and takes the first place in the Codeforces ranking of coders. At first, Korotkevich was the youngest overall winner of the IOI International School Olympiad in Informatics from Belarus, and later entered a Russian university and in 2013 and 2015 at the ICPC World Student Programming Championship as part of the ITMO University team won absolute gold. Korotkevich has also repeatedly won Yandex.Algorithm, VK Cup, Google Code Cup and many other competitions.
ITMO University students are six-time absolute world champions in programming in 2015 / Photo Wikipedia
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Universities
A great contribution to the training of the strongest IT personnel in Russia is made by universities: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, St. Petersburg State University, ITMO University, Moscow State University. Lomonosov, Saratov State University, Ural Federal University. Universities hold programming competitions. In Moscow, the MIPT IT Education Development Center holds the International MosCode Festival. The Ural Championship in sports programming is held annually, regular competitions are held in St. Petersburg, as well as in small towns like Kovrov.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, regular training competitions have been held in Russia and the countries of the former USSR: training camps in Petrozavodsk, Open Cup named after E. V. Pankratiev in programming. And since 2012, first at the MIPT campus, and now in Vladivostok, Grodno, Barcelona and Kollam (India), Moscow Workshops ICPC began to take place, where student teams from all over the world come to prepare for the Olympic Games in ICPC programming. To date, 167 universities from 50 countries have already taken part in them. The results of training at bootcamps are impressive - 10 out of 13 winners of the ICPC 2018 final championship were trained at ICPC Moscow Workshops. The local history of Russian bootcamps has grown into a global network and has no analogs of similar scale in other countries.
Basic programs in our country and abroad are generally similar, but the level of students is also important. We have such a strict selection in many universities that there are groups that are unique in terms of level. For example, at MIPT, the passing score for the Unified State Examination has been 94 for many years, which, on a par with MGIMO, makes it the most difficult university to enter in Russia. The students who passed the selection receive an in-depth education and work a lot in teams. The ability to work in a team, well-established by physicists, is an important skill in business. Now the leading universities of Russia, among which, for example, the National Research University Higher School of Economics and ITMO University, are actively developing the entrepreneurial competencies of students. MIPT is moving towards technological entrepreneurship, and many students continue to work in the teams formed during their studies after graduation. This is important, because at the stage of searching for investors, one of the key questions is “who is your team” and “how does the interaction take place in it”.
A striking example is Looksery Inc, founded by Viktor Shaburov, whose team has developed a popular application that adds masks to people's faces in video mode. The core of the company was the members of one programming olympiad team. Just three years after its inception, in 2015, they sold it to Snapchat for $150 million. Shaburov is now actively supporting education programs for schoolchildren and students. He recently founded the Botan Investments Foundation and opened a grant program for educators in the field of machine learning.
The Moscow-based trading algorithm developer AIM Tech, founded by Ilya Sedoshkin, also employs World Finals ICPC medalists from MIPT: Renat Gimadeev, Alexander Ostanin, Konstantin Semenov and others. This is an area where the speed of transactions is valued. And speed and algorithms are what is especially well developed in sports programming.
Technological entrepreneurship has also affected banks, which are now increasingly turning into IT companies. For example, the iPavlov project is developing an automatic chat for Sberbank of Russia based on machine learning technologies.
IT corporations and their wards
The coordinated work of universities and support from IT companies have shaped the culture of programming in our country. Business, together with universities, organizes training programs, thereby introducing new competencies and models of business processes that universities introduce into educational activities. Companies supporting IT education in the country include Yandex, JetBrains, Mail.Ru Group, 1C, Tinkoff Bank, Sberbank and others.
For example, the JetBrains company is developing a bachelor's program at the Department of Mathematical and Information Technologies at St. Petersburg State University, and together with Acronis, a master's program at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Mail.Ru Group organized five educational programs on web and mobile development, artificial intelligence and high-load projects: Technopark with Moscow State Technical University. N. E. Bauman, "Technosphere" with the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University. Lomonosov, Technotrek with MIPT, Technopolis with SPbPU and Technoatom with MEPhI.
Yandex has created many educational programs, for example, the "School of Data Analysis" for undergraduates and graduates of technical specialties. Yandex has also established a scholarship for Olympiad students who are first-year students of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science.
Companies draw staff from the student environment. The development of VKontakte is very close to the Olympiad approach to solving problems, because its creators have been in this system since school. For example, the software development of the VKontakte social network was handled by Nikolai Durov, a two-time winner of the ICPC World Programming Championship from St. Petersburg State University, and his teammate Andrey Lopatin, a Moscow Workshops ICPC coach who coached the victorious teams of St. Petersburg State University. And now ICPC champions Dmitry Egorov and Pavel Kunyavsky work in VKontakte.
Companies abroad also help students, but we are distinguished by working, effective programs. Yandex has created a relatively easy-to-use Yandex.Contest platform, where programming competitions are held. There, university professors can upload their assignments themselves. The verification is automated, which means it is unbiased, and this helps regional universities to integrate into the system of training leading programmers.
Employability of Russians
Champions of international competitions are guys who have worked very hard since school. For example, in the MIPT team, one of the participants had a medal from the International School Olympiad in Informatics. Another for six years at the university, in addition to studying, devoted several hours a day to training, went to countless championships, training camps.
At the competitions themselves, students overcome great psychological overload. The most difficult tasks, tight deadlines and strong rivals are not so bad. At the ICPC championship, for example, the guys are like under a microscope: they are constantly filmed by cameras, the screen with the code is broadcast on the Internet. Those who endure the load, in stressful situations at work, already feel much more confident.
freedom
The IT industry in Russia and the world is largely developing independently, according to the principle “The most efficient survives”. It makes no difference where you are from as long as your algorithms speed up processes and make the system work faster and cheaper. Therefore, programming is the thing in which a person can succeed both in Russia and abroad. Russian programmers, contrary to popular belief, do not always want to emigrate. Rather, they are looking for tasks that are interesting for themselves, of which there are many now in Yandex, VKontakte, and startups.
teachers
In the field of IT in Russia and the world there is a big shortage of personnel. Therefore, no matter which country or region you take, the average salary of an IT specialist will be higher than in other industries. According to HeadHunter, the average salary in the IT sector in Russia is 88,246 rubles, while the average salary in Russia is 45,640 rubles. In the US, according to Glassdoor, the average salary of an IT specialist in terms of rubles is about 330,000 per month. In the UK, the salary of a programmer is 31,901 pounds per year (about 220,000 rubles per month). In Switzerland, according to SwissInfo, programmers receive an average of 4,608 Swiss francs (about 230,000 rubles a month). But when working with statistics, you need to understand that the price level in other countries also varies significantly, the amount is affected by the ruble exchange rate against other currencies. Also, in many foreign countries, the level of taxes greatly reduces the real wage that the worker actually operates.
High salaries in IT are not the whole picture. Programmers from leading universities are snapped up immediately after graduation and even earlier - companies are trying to ensure the loyalty of future specialists already from school. And this trend is not only in Russia. There is a shortage of skilled programmers in Silicon Valley. In California, months-long programming courses for graduates of local colleges have become popular, because students after graduation cannot write code on their own.
It would seem that we just need to train more graduates, but someone should do this? And salaries in education are lower than in companies. It is in the IT industry that there is a big gap, which causes an outflow of quality teachers. It turns out that there is no one to prepare the next generation. Therefore, programming culture plays a big role in getting people involved and staying in the profession. In Europe and the US, it is not so developed, but we managed to involve a sufficient number of people in this system. In order for success in the IT field to continue, it is necessary to increase the prestige of IT education, to popularize this type of activity.
Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, John Carmack - what is not a name, then a legend. The Internet edition of VentureBeat lists the most authoritative programmers in the global IT community.
Linus Torvalds
Created Linux, a free operating system, in a dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, Linux runs data centers and supercomputers, and is developed by a horde of open-source fans around the world.
Torvalds is known, in particular, for the fact that he does not go into his pocket for a word and does not try to please the public. At one of his recent speeches, when asked from the audience if he scares off members of the Linux community with his manner of communication, he replied: "I don't give a damn about you." About Torvalds among developers there are the same jokes as among the townsfolk about Chuck Norris. For example, Torvalds can divide by zero and play 3D games, executing their source code in real time in his mind.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
The only one on this list who managed to earn a knighthood was knighted by the British Queen Elizabeth II. He is the creator of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the technology on which the entire Internet is built.
He now leads the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a non-profit organization supported by Google, Facebook and Microsoft, dedicated to making broadband accessible to people around the world.
Donald Knuth
Academic writings in computer science earned him the title of "father of algorithm analysis". Everything on the web, from Facebook's feed selection algorithm to Amazon's similar product selection algorithm, owes something to it. At 77, he is writing a book called The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth is also an honorary professor at Stanford.
Brendan Icke
The creator of the JavaScript programming language, which is the de facto standard for web programming. Participated in the creation of Mozilla, the company that develops the Firefox browser. Resigned as CEO when it became known about his material support of the project to ban gay marriage in California.
Solomon Hykes
The creator of Docker, a technology that developers love because it packages an application with its entire environment into containers and delivers it to servers. Works like a virtual machine, but much faster. Docker started out as a side project at dotCloud, but when it turned out to be a popular product, the company went through a pivot and soon became a unicorn.
Mark Zuckerberg
Creator of Facebook. He believes that the smaller and more flexible the team, the more successful it will work. The billionth social network is served by "only" 10,000 people around the world.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Known as DHH. Founder of Ruby on Rails, the super popular framework that earned him the title and Google Hacker of the Year award in 2005.
Richard Stallman
Known primarily for the fight for free software, the founder of GNU, the author of the idea of "copyleft" - as opposed to copyright. Very principled, does not use any proprietary developments.
Bram Cohen
The creator of the BitTorrent protocol, which gave users the ability to download files super-fast. BitTorrent is incredibly popular, with a modest estimate of a total user base of 250 million worldwide. Last year, Thom Yorke tried to distribute the album exclusively through BitTorrent. And yet, the possibilities of BitTorrent were primarily appreciated by Internet pirates.
James Gosling
Created the Java programming language while working at Sun Microsystems. After the takeover of Oracle in 2010, Gosling retired, becoming one of Oracle's top critics. Since then, he worked for five months at Google before joining startup Liquid Robotics. He is also a member of the famous Ukrainian startup Jelastic as an independent director.
Bjorn Stroustrup
The Danish programmer created the C++ programming language in 1978, improving C. He is still actively working: he teaches at Texas A&M University, Columbia University, and is also employed at Morgan Stanley.
John Carmack
Co-founder of id Software. All over the world he is known as the creator of Doom. Incidentally, the idea for the game was born during a D&D party that the team had been holding regularly at id Software headquarters for several years. And the game master has always been John. He was the first to try out the tricks of 3D graphics that are still used today.
He is now employed by Oculus VR, which Facebook bought for $2 billion.
They managed to create legendary products that changed the world and shock humanity with outrageousness. The top richest programmers in the world are opened by our compatriot.
5th place - Pavel Durov. The eccentric creator of the popular social network VKontakte in the Russian Federation and the Telegram messenger is young (he is only 33 years old), but already fabulously rich. Forbes estimates his fortune at 1.7 billion dollars - with this money you can buy 60,000 one-room apartments in Novosibirsk.
Pavel became interested in programming at the age of 11 and used his knowledge for hooliganism. Once he changed the screensaver on all school computers to a photo of a computer science teacher with the caption "Must die." Pavel created his main brainchild, the VKontakte social network, in 2006 after meeting the American Facebook. Today "VK" is the most visited site in Runet.
In 2014, Pavel Durov emigrated abroad. After the sale of VKontakte, he started developing the Telegram messenger. In 2017, he was not afraid to enter into a major conflict with Roskomnadzor, refusing to issue keys for decrypting correspondence. The war with varying success on both sides is still ongoing.
4th place - Linus Torvalds. A Finnish-American programmer and hacker created the famous Linux - the core of the GNU / Linux operating system, which is today the most common free operating system. Torvalds shares the ideology of open source, and everyone has access to the Linux code to improve this product.
On September 17, 1991, the source code of the program, posted by Linus for public download, caused a real stir among thousands of programmers. Everyone began to improve the OS and share their results. Now only about 2% of the Linux system kernel is written by Torvalds himself, but it is up to him to make changes to the official kernel branch. An asteroid was named after Linus Torvalds, and Time magazine recognized him as one of the most influential people.
3rd place - Sergey Brin. The co-founder of the Google empire at the end of 2017 took 13th place in the Forbes list with a fortune of $ 47.5 billion. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973 to a family of mathematicians. At the age of six, Sergei moved to the United States with his parents, but still speaks Russian with them.
In 1998, Brin co-founded Google with fellow graduate student Larry Page. Google now operates over a million servers around the world and processes over a billion search queries and 24 petabytes of user data every day. The company owns such "monsters" as YouTube and Android OS.
2nd place - Mark Zuckerberg. Developer of the largest social network in the world - Facebook. He also owns the Instagram social network and the WhatsApp messenger. Mark called himself a hacker by vocation. The 25-year-old programmer has become one of the youngest billionaires. In 2017, his fortune increased to $71 billion.
Zuckerberg is characterized by unusual features - for example, he only eats the meat of animals that he killed with his own hands. Mark is distinguished by perseverance - for example, by marrying a Chinese American, he set himself the task of learning Chinese and successfully coped with this. Despite his wealth, the billionaire drives a regular Volkswagen Golf GTI and is also considered the most gaudily dressed resident of Silicon Valley.
1st place - Bill Gates. In the 1990s, his name became a household name - the so-called successful rich people. In 1996, Gates became the richest man on the planet. As of 2017, Gates ranks second in the Forbes ranking with $90 billion.
At the age of 13, Bill wrote his first program - the game "Tic-Tac-Toe" in the BASIC programming language. At the age of 15, he hacked into a computer to extend the expired hours of work, and was excommunicated from the car for the whole summer. By the end of elementary school, Gates' bad behavior began to worry his parents and teachers so much that he was referred to a psychiatrist.
In 1975, he founded Microsoft, which grew into a software giant and brought the Windows operating system to the world.
