The Top 20 Programming Languages in 2022

CodeGuru content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

2022 has reached its final quarter and, as usual, this means that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published its annual list of the top programming languages for the year. Their list includes the following metrics:

Let’s break each one of them down.

These categories include the following languages from the highest ranking to the lowest:

Read: Top Online Courses to Learn C# Programming

How are these rankings are judged? Each language’s popularity was measured by 8 metrics. These include:

Let’s explore each of these metrics more closely.

The IEEE makes use of a template known as “X programming” to get the number (which indicates the volume of online resources about each of the respective programming languages) of hits for each programming language.

By using the Twitter Search API, the template (X Programming) was used for the months January through August to gather the amount of chatter on social media for each language. This is usually the sharing of news articles, hackathons, and books.

Just a quick note on the Twitter API: The Twitter Development Platform is used to tap into Twitter’s platform from your applications.

There are three different products being counted for:

More information about the Twitter API can be found here.

Stack Overflow is a programming forum, such as CodeGuru and VB Forums. IEEE measured the number of questions asked that mentioned each programming language. With the help of the Stack Exchange API, the IEEE was able to tabulate the desired measurements.

More information on the Stack Exchange API can be found here.

A similar method, like the methods above, was applied to measure the number of posts that mentioned each programming language on Reddit, using the Reddit API.

More information about the Reddit API can be found here.

The IEEE Xplore API searched through 3.6 million articles that mention a programming language. More information on the IEEE Xplore API for developers can be found here.

The IEEE measured the demand for programming languages in job postings on its IEEE Jobs Site. This contains a huge amount of non-U.S. listings. You can learn more about the IEEE Jobs Site here.

The IEEE measured the demand for programming languages in job postings on the CareerBuilder job website to help determine popularity of programming languages based on how many jobs were available for each.

The IEEE made use of GitHub 2.0 to measure the top 50 programming languages used in GitHub repositories. The below table lists the top 50 programming languages being used on GitHub:

You can view the GitHub programming language usage stats here.