Python, the fastest growing and the most popular programming language

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Python is the fastest-growing programming language, and by 2019 will significantly outstrip other languages in terms of active developers. With a 27% year-over year-growth rate, Python stands alone as a tag that is both large and growing rapidly; the next-largest tag that shows similar growth is R.

That's the prediction of programming Q&A hub Stack Overflow, based on the ballooning number of developers viewing questions about Python on its site. The extrapolation is based on a huge amount of data, Stack Overflow is the world's largest online community site for developers, with more than 50 millions amateur and professional devs visiting the site every month.

"The term 'fastest-growing' can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language," says Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson in a blog post.

In the five years to June 2017, Python has gone from the least to the most popular of the top six programming languages, with a 2.5x increase in views of Python questions. Robinson says that these statistics relate to developers from "high-income" nations and are "generally representative of trends in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and other such countries".

The popularity of Python is, in part, due to its flexibility, with the language used regularly by web and desktop developers, sysadmin/devops, and more recently by data scientists and machine-learning engineers.

"It seems like Python is used in every domain — system operations, web development, deployment, scientific modeling, etc etc. There is no other language that is so versatile," says Jacqueline Kazil, board director of the Python Software Foundation (PSF).

The rapid spread of Python also stems from its strong community, she says, as well as "the language itself, readability, conciseness, and the completeness of its standard library, which we call "batteries included".

Python won't just stay at the top, according to a predictive model put together by Stack Overflow's Robinson, but will decisively consolidate its lead over other languages over the next two years.

While interest in Java and JavaScript is forecast to remain static, views of Python-related questions will continue to climb, and by 2019 will account for about 15 percent of all views on Stack Overflow, the model predicts. (source: Techrepublic.com)