Programming languages: C++ overtakes PHP, but JavaScript, Python and Java still rule While the most used programming languages remain stable, there's quite a lot of change elsewhere.

JavaScript may be the language of the web, as Jon Udell wrote back in 2015, but it’s a language that forces us to “battl [e] the language itself” as we try to apply it to more complex problems.

Programming language popularity: JavaScript leads – 5 million new developers since 2017 But Python has also gained 2.2 million developers over the past year while Java adds 1.7 million since 2017.

What just happened? For the first time in more than 20 years, the Python programming language has overtaken Java, JavaScript, and C as the most popular language.