# Tuesday, December 21, 2010
According to Darryl Taft, the top languages for next year (and this may surprise you) are going to be Java, C, and C++. You're probably all ready to disagree, but understand the criteria:

... the workhorse languages such as C and C++ continue to remain at the top end of the software development landscape in terms of language use and job potential (despite growing more slowly and even decreasing, according to some sources). Moreover, this list is not intended to highlight the hot, hip new languages on the horizon, but to focus on where programmers can go to look for work.

There's a large body of work being done in languages that are not new, or hot, or trendy, but that have been around for long enough to develop a body of developers and libraries that enable getting things done. The volume of code that will not be ported to new and exciting languages, and will be maintained in its current language for years and decades, will always outweigh the volume of code that is being written from scratch right now or being ported. If you want a job, knowing an "old workhorse" language is a good thing.

Darryl profiles 18 languages in all: Java, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, VB, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, ActionScript, Groovy, Go, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and F#. That is an awful lot of curly brackets, a very high placement for Objective-C given that it really does only one thing, and a fair dose of hot/new/trendy once you get past the top ten. Worth a read!

Kate


Tuesday, December 21, 2010 1:50:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #