Which Programming Languages Should Our Schools Concentrate On?
There are over 700 programming languages. We can’t teach all.
At Seven Academy, these are the five criteria we use to select programming languages for our training:
1. Languages that are already mainstream and firmly established in the Software Development industry.
Here are the programming languages our students use in their projects.
Sometimes I wonder if some of them know these programming languages surpass them in age. These programming languages have stood the test of time. They are not going to be on the shelves anytime soon.
2. Languages whose popularity is increasing or stable and not sharply decreasing.
According to the StackOverflow 2019 survey, here are the popular programming languages.
Designing a training program with this information in mind keeps our students in line with developers across the world.
3. Programming languages that have a large set of libraries, frameworks, tooling support, and a large community.
Apart from studying in class, we expect our students to do a lot of research. School facilities (computers and the internet) are always available for them to maximize the use of resources online.
4. Languages that are demanding in the job market with a good salary.
According to the 2020 CodinGame annual survey of HR professionals and developers, the top 10 in-demand programming languages are currently:
- JavaScript (71% of respondents are on the hunt for candidates with this skill)
- Java (57%)
- C# (53%)
- Python (51%)
- C++ (40%)
- PHP (40%)
- C (16%)
- Kotlin (16%)
- ObjectiveC (16%)
- Ruby (15%)
We agree with this survey because these are the languages we need at Seven GPS - an incubation center for our students from Seven Academy.
5. Non-Academic Programming Languages
Since our programs are focused on practice and real-life applications, we’ve limited the number of academic programming languages in the training.
This is because some are only widely used by computer scientists for studying their theoretical properties. In other words, we handpicked programming languages that can be implemented leaving theory out.
What do you think about the criteria we used to design this web development training?
CS PhD @ Stanford
4 年That is definitely a great approach. Especially the fact that you localized the developer survey to Cameroon and did not depend on something like a StackOverflow or Github survey. Indeed, some tools/languages that have gained traction globally take time to gain footing in other developer communities. I also think when starting off something that's not console based works a lot. It's hard to motivate and keep the interest of novices when all they see is a black screen (of course there are a few caveats with this). You could also break the training into tracks, where each one focuses on a different set of languages (technologies). But in the end irrespective of what languages you pick the end goal should be to make them learn how to program and I think they can be able to pick up others with ease. Great insights by the way and thanks for sharing.
Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 11 Programmer, Software Engineer
4 年Very interesting the approach. However in the survey separating html and css as two different languages can be misleading as the two nearly always go together. To some extend we can add JavaScript to that duo but some will say it’s nowadays used as a backend language
Venture Builder
4 年Thats sounds great , i can help in hardware and embedded S.W