Like every year, Codementor has compiled a detailed report on programming languages one should not learn in 2019. Usually, most studies are focused on the popular, or most loved/dreaded programming languages but Codementor takes a reverse approach on the state of programming languages.
Languages that have overall topped the list of “worst programming languages” are Elm, CoffeeScript, Erlang, Lua, and Perl.
It is to be noted that for the purpose of this study, Codementor has excluded JavaScript, Python, and Java as they are obviously very good languages with huge popularity. The survey also wanted to evaluate less popular languages to find out how they perform against one another.
20 programming languages were ranked in this study in terms of three metrics:
- Community Engagement
- Growth and Trends
- Job Market
So let’s check out the complete list.
Programming Languages Not To Learn In 2019
As you can see in the image above, Elm is the worst among the top five languages not to learn in 2019. Next up is CoffeeScript which is followed by Erlang, Lua, and Perl respectively.
The results are quite different from last year when Dart was voted as the worst programming language of 2018. This year, Dart went 13 ranks lower on the list signifying a great improvement.
So how did it manage to improve 13 places in one year?
The answer lies with Google’s Flutter announcement. It happened around this time last year, leading to a boost in its Community Engagement score. The small but vocal Dart community now has several developers who have been talking about or experimenting with Dart and Flutter since last year.
The second spot too saw a drastic change, compared to last year when Objective-C was the runner-up in 2018. This has changed in 2019 with CoffeeScript displacing Objective-C.
You can compare the changes from last year in the image below:
Compared to the previous year’s ranking for the worst programming languages, we can conclude that the title of Most Improved Languages this year definitely goes to Dart and Ruby.
On the other hand, Kotlin and R fell pretty hard this year to be titled as the Least Improved.
Finally, Clojure and Haskell are the two languages that Stayed Consistent by maintaining a stronghold over their rankings from 2018 to 2019.
Which programming languages you shouldn’t learn first in 2019?
Analyzing how the rankings have changed from 2018 to 2019, Codementor also recommends which languages you probably should not learn as a first programming language.
So the top three programming languages to avoid for beginners are CoffeeScript, Erlang, and Lua.
However, as an aspiring coder, if you still want to learn any of these languages, you can do so anyway as these languages could make a comeback by 2020 (you never know!).
Here are some more interesting insights on the programming landscape if you’d like to know:
