Every year various programming communities try to create and to analyze the rating of existing programming languages. Just to mention few of them: TIOBE, PYPL, IEEE etc. These ratings are based on different approaches, e.g. popularity of tutorials for particular programming languages, data analysis at GitHub and StackOverflow or even analysis of messages in Twitter.
These ratings might help when making a decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. Also they can be used by students or starting programmers to get a better feeling of what skills are mostly asked. Of course, every programming language despite of its rating, has a particular goal. It is designed to fulfill certain tasks. Even if one language is much more “popular” than some other, it does always not mean, that it is better. More frequently one programming language cannot even be substituted by some other due to system requirements. For example, it is not possible to write iOS apps in JAVA and Web browser can only execute JavaScript and no C++ code. Like every plumbing requires its own tools, so every development depends on the current requirements.
So what are the most popular languages of the year 2016? First place is traditionally JAVA. Also C and C++ stay at the top of all the ratings. C# has its stable high position as well. Popular script languages are PHP, Python and JavaScript. Functional programming languages like R become more and more popular.