Java and JavaScript UK's most in-demand developer skills - and there's a growing AWS skills-gap, too

Python, JavaScript and Java all the fastest-growing developer technologies in the UK

The latest figures on the developer ecosystem from Stack Overflow suggests that Java and JavaScript remain two of the most in-demand coding and scripting languages in the UK.

The developer community website, which provides a community forum for techie types to ask advice on programming challenges, is focusing the first of four reports this year on employment.

Python, JavaScript and Java top Stack Overflow's list of the fastest-growing scripting/development languages, with growth of ten per cent each. They were followed by C# on eight per cent, HTML and PHP sharing five per cent apiece, while jQuery, CSS, Android and SQL are on four per cent each.

This creates a slight issue for employers.

Despite being the fifth most-requested skill in Stack Overflow's job section, Amazon Web Services (AWS) doesn't appear on the list at all.

The data was collected by Stack Overflow from user questions, views and answers, by language, IP address, and behaviour from that IP address.

It's not a foolproof survey. For example, it doesn't take into account regional variations and somewhere like Canary Wharf has a disproportionate number of finance-based IT roles, which use different languages and tools in areas where, for example, web development is king.

A quick look at Stack Overflow Jobs shows, for example, a head of mobile for the BBC, based in Salford, an example of an employer becoming increasingly less "London-centric".

It also doesn't reflect what languages are being used for.

Python scores highly as it is a good first language and is therefore skewed by the education sector - meaning the demand for AWS is actually probably more crucial than Stack Overflow's research makes out. But, equally, it may create an illusion of Python jobs that simply aren't there.

This time last year, Stack Overflow conducted a survey that showed that 55.4 per cent of users were running Javascript, followed by SQL, Java, C# and PHP, while the most in-demand skill was for Android developers.

It also reflected that the user base was almost entirely (94.1 percent) male, and we'll be interested to see if that terrible figure has improved any this year.