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In the past six months, there has been a considerable increase in the number of developers. JavaScript is still by far the most popular programming language, although C# seems to have surpassed PHP’s popularity.

This is evident from the latest version of SlashData’s semi-annual State of the Developer Nation report. The report estimates that there are now some 24.3 million active developers worldwide. This is an increase of 14 percent from the 21.3 million users there were in October 2020. SlashData considers someone who has a “constant spectrum of involvement in coding” as a developer.

JavaScript continues to rule the world of software development. While there were still 12.4 million developers with skills in the web programming language last October, there are now 13.8 million. That is an increase of more than 11 percent. More than half of all developers know their way around the language. Python is second in popularity. The programming language, which is often used for machine learning and artificial intelligence, is now mastered by 10.1 million developers. Six months ago, this was still 9 million.

The reason JavaScript is at the top of the list is because it is a second language for many developers. Projects that primarily revolve around Java, C# or PHP often include some JavaScript code. SlashData researchers estimate that a quarter of all developers use JavaScript in their projects.

Java’s popularity also continues unabated. The number of Java developers has risen from 8.2 to 9.4 million in the past six months. Whereas last autumn around six million people could handle PHP, C# or C/C++, this number now stands at 6.3, 6.5 and 7.3 million respectively.

Rust on the rise

Another interesting programming language is Rust. Currently, there are only 1.3 million developers who know it, but six months ago, there were only 800,000. Moreover, Google has recently launched an offensive to increase the popularity of the programming language with protection against memory vulnerabilities. The company has added the possibility to tinker with its Android operating system in the language and is lobbying for the same to be done to the Linux kernel.