11 Most In-Demand Programming Languages in 2022

You don’t want to waste your time. If you’re going to put aside the time and energy needed to learn new programming languages, you want to make sure, without a doubt, that the ones you choose are the most in-demand programming languages on the market. 

After all, if you’re trying to start (or advance) a career in software development, you’ll need to be at the front of the metaphorical class. You’ll need to know which programming languages are popular, which are useful and which are up-and-coming on the market — and then set yourself up to learn them. 

Not sure where to start? Don’t worry; we’ve already done the heavy lifting for you, and looked through developer and market data from the past several years to identify trends and draw conclusions that will help you plan for your programming education. In this article, we’ll walk you through the 11 most in-demand programming languages and give you a few pointers on how to learn them. 

But before we get started, let’s recap how we built this list in the first place. When we sat down to figure out what the most in-demand programming languages for 2022 might be, we had two primary research questions:

• Which languages are in demand right now? 
• Which ones are growing in popularity and will be in demand soon?

You can probably guess the rationale behind our first question. While following trends isn’t always the best way to figure out which languages to prioritize, a language’s popularity can indicate its prominence in the market. Here’s a general rule of thumb for you — the more used or common a language is, the more likely it is that a developer (i.e., you!) will need to deal with it at work.

Next, we considered which skills are poised to become the most sought-after programming languages on the market. To do so, we dug into Stack Overflow’s developer surveys from the last two years and focused on: 

• The languages that developers report they use and want to continue using 
• The languages that developers aren’t using yet, but are interested in using

By looking at these trends, we aimed to gain a better understanding of which languages will become popular in the years ahead. 

We found that Rust, Python and Typescript all topped Stack Overflow’s list for the most-loved languages in 2019 and 2020, with only slight shuffling across years. Similarly, Python, JavaScript and Go ruled the top three of Stack’s Most Wanted lists for both years. Given their prevalence in developers’ minds, the odds of these five languages increasing in popularity is high — and are therefore worth including on our list. 

However, where we ranked each language depended on other factors. For example, because Python has consistently held a top-five spot on Stack Overflow’s most commonly-used, -loved and -wanted lists, we chose to rank it higher than Rust, which, while ranking #1 on Stack’s most-loved list, languishes at #19 on the organization’s common-languages list.  

Now that we’ve covered our process, let’s start answering the question at hand: What are the most in-demand coding languages for 2022?