CodeFights Report Reveals Programming Language Efficiency, Popularity

CodeFights’ 2016 State of Programming report reveals which languages are the most popular among developers and which ones they are using most efficiently.

CodeFights’ study, which comes from analysis of its customer base, found that in gender battles between male and female engineers on their coding efficiency, men won 54.3 percent of the time. Women won 45.7 percent of the time in their matchups.

CodeFights also analyzed how quickly developers can accurately handle algorithmic coding tasks, and found that developers were “generally faster and more accurate” on C++ than Python, JavaScript and Java.

According to the data, Java is still the hardest coding language to use efficiently to solve algorithmic programming problems. Developers were able to handle those tasks more efficiently in 65 percent of cases on Python, compared to 35 percent for Java. Similarly, Java beat out C++ in only 40 percent of head-to-head battles.

Java, which already has been pegged as a less-efficient language, also frequently requires additional characters to solve coding problems compared to other languages. CodeFights notes developers needed about 191 characters to get the job done on Java, leaving it in second-to-last place.

CodeFights presented developers with a challenge to use as few characters as possible in solving a programming problem. Swift took the most characters of any language, requiring an average of 198 characters in its testing, the company noted.

On the same “shortest solution” challenge, Perl took the day. According to CodeFights, developers needed an average of 84 characters to offer a solution to the problem it presented, less than half of the last-place Swift.

C++ is the world’s most popular programming language. According to CodeFights, it has a 24 percent of the worldwide market share, just topping Python at 22 percent and Java at 20 percent.

PHP might be used by popular content management system WordPress, but it isn’t nearly as popular as other programming languages. In fact, it has just 4 percent market share worldwide, tying it with Ruby and putting it far behind C#, which has 8 percent market share.

In the United States, JavaScript is the most popular coding language, with a 24.1 percent market share in the country. Java is close behind with a 23.3 percent market share. C++, the most popular programming language worldwide, secured only 14.8 percent market share in the United States in 2016.

PHP and Ruby once again were among the least-desired programming languages in the United States in 2016. Ruby is in last place with just 3.7 percent U.S. market share. Ruby was a bit more popular at 5.5 percent market share, but still far behind C#, which nabbed 10.2 percent of the market.