Google Go, TypeScript, Swift, F# and Rust are the most wanted newer languages, according to Stack Overflow survey

But JavaScript still rules the roost among developers

If you're looking for a job in software development you could do worse than learning JavaScript. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Hiring Landscape Survey 2017, carried out among the site's users, JavaScript remains the most used language for another year. It is also one of the most in demand by employers, according to other recent surveys. Equipped with skills in the de-facto language of the web, you will be in demand for years to come.

Other stalwarts such as Microsoft's C#, Python, Java, PHP, C++ and C are also popular languages to learn, and there will always be plenty of openings for those proficient in them. The same applies to database querying skills represented by SQL.

But what of the newer languages that developers are interested in, the ones that will be important in the technology of tomorrow? The difference between the graphs of skills developers have now and those they want to learn tells its own story.

TypeScript rides surprisingly high. Known by 10.6 per cent with 19.3 per cent putting it on their to-do list, TypeScript is Microsoft's attempt to add heavy-duty functionality to JavaScript. Like many of the latest Microsoft ventures since its Damascene conversion, it is free and open source. Compiling to Javascript code it is useful for developing complex web applications and for weeding out bugs caused by wrongly specified data types in JavaScript.

Known by a mere 3.8 per cent with 16.5 per cent wanting to make its acquaintance is Google's Go. Designed to be quick to build, with modern features such as concurrency and garbage collection built in, it is easy to write Go applications and to deploy them and it can run on Windows, Linux, Mac and even on small devices like the Raspberry Pi.

5.3 per cent of the respondents were proficient in Apple's Swift, a general-purpose programming language created as a modern alternative to Objective-C, with another 12 per cent wishing they did.

Functional languages F# and Haskell and those with functional attributes such as Scala and Clojure are also subjects of increasing interest. Functional programming has become more popular in an era of distributed computing, multithreaded processing and cheap storage.

"Storage is now cheap and mutation is expensive, whereas before it was the other way around," explained Simon Peyton-Jones, one of the originators of Haskell, which is not a new language but one experincing a new lease of life.

Current users of Mozilla's Rust, another language with functional attributes, are nowhere to be seen on the most used side of the chart, but Rust sits almost halfway up the most wanted side. Some feel Rust may soon be a serious alternative to C++ for systems programming.

One surprise omission: Node. Notable by their absence on the wishlist? VBA, Visual Basic 6, Groovy and Matlab.