Updated: November 6, 2024
A couple of centuries after Charles Babbage’s research of machines that could calculate, we arrived at the Cloud Computing and Distributed Platforms realm. As of 2021, we live out of the technology state, which offers an option for us to interact through an extra domain, such as virtual reality in addition to mobile phones. The latter has unfolded in its own set of development trends, making the mobile-first design approach a software industry standard. Tech progress ultimately breaks down to the evolution of programming languages. The latest technology trends create our observed future, and it’s making its way to the digital-first state of business.
With cognitive automation emerging and other new technology trends rising in 2021, the event horizon of computation is predicted to turn to the spatial web and quantum computing allowing for brain-computer interfaces. The latter technology is making huge progress in areas such as mental health, providing great relief for patients with trauma and disability. The end goal of technological progress, as reported by the World Economic Forum and Deloitte, is to create a more simple, abundant, and intelligent world around us.
Looking closer at what the IT Industry has prepared for us in 2021, we notice the evolution of programming languages, frameworks, and other related platforms and tools. Through a software development survey practice conducted each year, we observe a global spike of interest in emerging technologies in 2021.
As put in the Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey, a few pre-pandemic trends were introduced, like seeking the diversity of coders and the correlations of the demographics to the tools they had been using. At the same time, one topic has been excluded from the recent web developer survey, and it’s the popular development environments discussion. Additionally, the DevOps theme remains on the watch list in 2021, as new frameworks are being introduced to it.
Let’s look into the most progressive programming trends from the recent software development survey and see how our company’s own practice supports these numbers.
Top Programming Languages
There’s no secret, applied both for front-end and back-end, the event-driven JavaScript has been the global leader of programming languages for almost 10 years now. HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, and Java sit at the top five respectively. Object-oriented Python is used extensively in machine learning. It has been holding up to the title of the most wanted languages and is one of the most paid technologies in the world. While Rust, designed for performance and safety, has become the most loved programming language in 2020 and further on.
TypeScript, Kotlin and Go are wanted and loved equally by the global community of developers. But what’s been truly highlighted in programming language popularity in 2021 is Go. It heads the top of the most paying technologies both in the United States and globally. How did Go become one of the top most wanted and top most loved technologies?
The Rise of Go
Go is a compiled open-source programming language. It was designed at Google in 2007 to address the efficiency of C and motivated to improve some of the qualities of C++. On the one hand, the main purpose of the language was relative simplicity attained by omitting some of the features that are common in similar languages. On the other hand, it was built with preserving their most useful characteristics in mind, such as static-typing and run-time efficiency, readability and usability, high-performance networking, and multi-processing. Go has quickly become the standard language for the new generation of coders at Google.
Go shares the syntax and environment patterns close to high-level programming languages, which at runtime execute many common behaviors that static programming languages perform during compilation. However, Go has a somewhat distinctive approach to particular problems. First, it has built-in concurrency primitives: light-weight processes (goroutines), channels, and the select statement. Second, it has type embedding instead of non-virtual inheritance. Finally, Go contains a toolchain that produces statically linked native binaries without external dependencies.
According to Go Developer Survey 2020, Golang usage is expanding in the workplace and enterprise with 76% of respondents using Go at work, and 66% saying Go is critical to their company’s success. Furthermore, Go continues to be heavily used for APIs, CLIs, Web, DevOps, and Data Processing. One of the cases where Go has shown excellent results is bidding in real time.
Top Web Frameworks
Web frameworks are designed to support the development of web applications, including web services, web resources, and web APIs. According to Stack Overflow data, JQuery, React.js, Angular, ASP.NET, and Express have been among the leaders of developers’ choices. While ASP.NET Core was the most loved one, React.js and Vue.js had become the most wanted technology. Django also has made it to the top five of the most wanted. Gatsby, Spring, and Flask were reported among the most loved frameworks.
React Goes On
While JavaScript continues to take over the development environments, React.js is its open-source library that was designed specifically for building web and mobile user interfaces. React includes native application front-end libraries written in JS called React Native for iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms. Initially introduced through Facebook, it is actively supported by the community of developers and companies. The major changes to React go through the Future of React repository on the Facebook forum. The community discusses potential features, experimental APIs, and JavaScript syntax improvements. Introduced in 2017, React Fiber is a set of internal rendering algorithms breaking down the animation into segments that can be spread out over multiple frames providing smoother on-screen rendering.
Svelte
Svelte represents one of the game-changers in technology. It’s a front-end compiler, or a component framework, written in TypeScript, which continues the trend of simplified code at build time. It’s a bit different from regular frameworks because it has made rethinking reactivity its objective. Svelte generates imperative code to manipulate the Document Object Model and reduces the size of transferred files. It gives better client startup and run-time performance. Svelte has its own compiler for converting app code into client-side JavaScript, HTML/CSS at build time.
Top Platforms
Linux and Windows have been heading the platforms for a long time. Platforms such as Android, macOS, and Raspberry Pi have also been popular in software development. However, with the popularity of Cloud and DevOps, Docker, AWS, and Kubernetes have strengthened their presence amongst the most sought-after technologies and became the top five.
Kubernetes
DevOps is heading the latest technology trends. And Kubernetes is one of the most popular technologies in DevOps. First, it was created to solve container orchestration problems on a high scale or in mission-critical applications. Nowadays, it has shown an incredibly fast adoption in the Enterprise sector.
Released in June 2014, Kubernetes’s ecosystem included a package manager, dozens of open-source distributions, great monitoring tools, K8s products from all major Сloud providers, and ArgoCD. Kubernetes provides complex features such as container discovery, CNI, pod tainting, stateful sets, auto scalers, and others in a declarative way. All of the above has made it the tool of choice for most distributed applications.
Kubernetes is known for reducing the complexity of production applications. Of course, it’s on the pricey side. While being a great option for mature applications, smaller projects will be made more expensive to launch with K8s. Since you need to scale the platform enough for it to show its strengths. Alternative options in such case could be ECS, DigitalOcean Apps Platform, or simply CI/CD onto an EC2.
— Kirill Danshin, DevOps Architect at *instinctools.
In conclusion, great trends are often continued. Others, like personal preferences in coders’ tools, are put behind. When it comes to the choice of languages, frameworks, and platforms used by developers, these are normally discussed within the teams. Focusing on the project specifications, a proper programming language, or the combination of languages is chosen to better fit the product characteristics.
Speaking of the rebuild tasks, software developers look at the current user requirements compared to those of the past. Choosing from the latest technology trends, we want to make sure they adhere to the end goals of the product.
Read about trends in software development on our blog and choose your favorite technologies. Get your project scoped by filling out the request below. If you are not sure where to start with your product, let us know how we can help. For more updates, follow us on social media.
