Which Popular Programming Languages We Use?

Quite often we get asked by our clients and job candidates what are the programming languages we used in our web development. While we think that the popularity of the languages changes depend on the market demands, it's also good to know what are the programming language that gains momentum and actively adopted, and what are the pushing factor behinds the popularity.

We will refer to list of the top programming languages for 2017 released by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on IEEE Spectrum for this discussion.

Courtesy of IEEE (image source)

Among the programming languages, we have actively using Python, R, Javascript, PHP, Go and NodeJS.

PHP

We think that PHP is still the most common web language as you can host your web application written in PHP almost on any shared hosting. With the release of PHP7, the performance of PHP has been doubled when compare to its predecessor PHP5.6. Also with the release of new modern framework like Laravel, it helps in the adoption of the language. Therefore PHP will continue to play an important role and active usage in our development project.

PHP 7 performance comparison (image source)

JavaScript

There are many improvements to the JavaScript language with the release of ES2015 and the coming ES2017 (or ES8). Microsoft has been actively promoting TypeScript, which aims to make the Javascript to have static typing, classes and interface. TypeScript helps IDE to spot common error as you code. On the other hands, the powerful JavaScript framework like AngularJS, Vue.JS, React and many other help to boost the productivity of the JavaScript programmer. (Note: we wrote a blog about how to integrate Vue.JS into Wordpress, you can read it here). All these make writing JavaScript become a breeze and something enjoyable. For the would-be front end developer, you have to master JavaScript as much as you can.

Go

Go is kind of different than the previous two as it is a compiled language. This means for every single changes you make, you have to compile your application to see the changes. Being a strong static language, Go performance is great. Go is heavily used by Google, the docker community and many tech companies like Dropbox, BitBucket, Digital Ocean, to name but a few. You can get the complete list of company using Go at here. We use Go as our backend server for our Q&A platform, infogenie. Infogenie aims to bring experts from all fields to share their expertise insight and tips to help to create a caring community.

R

R is an open source programming language mainly used in statistical computing. In the past, R is more in academical research. We have use R in our machine learning development to model the recommendation system. We find the R is very flexible and quite nice to use when we run the simulation and testing on R studio.

Python

Python is an interpreted language and has been very popular as a language for the machine learning. The syntax is clean and easy to learn. Python has a massive and active user base with many packages available to be used. It is a language that you should have try to play with if you haven't. You will love its readability and productivity.

This is a short blog about the popular programming language that we used. What programming language you like the most? Let us know.