Software Engineering and Programming Trends 2022

Plus what Programming languages for what kind of industry job?

This won’t be your usual Software Engineering trends article but just a snapshot of some features of programming (and technology trends) that I really find interesting. This will have in parts a tl;dr framework so students of programming and datascience can quickly ascertain and find the information they need.

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So let’s get into it:

(The first section of these trends will deal with programming languages related to particular fields in a tl;dr format). Skip past if you want to get the 2022 trends section.

1. Power your Career Goals in Software With Purpose

If you are a job seeker or a someone who wants to get into Software engineering and programing, having an idea of which industry you would prefer to work in can give you the headstart to the direction to take.

According to Fullstack academy, if you have determined your career goals, you should concentrate on the following:

• JavaScript, Elm, TypeScript are used in front-end web development

• JavaScript, Scala, Python, Go, Ruby are useful for back-end web development

• Swift, Java, Objective C, JavaScript serve in mobile development

• Unity, TypeScript are typical in game development

• Scala, Go, Python are popular for developing desktop applications

• Go, Rust are perfect for systems programming

Put another way let’s try to spell that out:

FRONT-END WEB DEVELOPMENT

• JavaScript

• Elm

• TypeScript

BACK-END WEB DEVELOPMENT

• JavaScript

• Scala

• Python

• Go

• Ruby

MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

• Swift

• Java

• Objective C

• JavaScript

GAME DEVELOPMENT

• Unity

• TypeScript

DESKTOP APPLICATIONS

• Scala

• Go

• Python

SYSTEMS PROGRAMMING

• Go

• Rust

2. What Programming Languages to Learn to Work in Blockchain?

• Solidity

• Scala

• Rust

• C++

• C#

• Kotlin

• Java

• Python

• Java-Script

• PHP

• Go

• Simplicity

• Ruby

3. What Programming Languages to Learn to Work in Machine Learning?

• Python

• R

• Julia

• Java

• JavaScript

• LISP

• Typescript

• Go

• Shell

4. What Programming Languages to Learn to Work in Cybersecurity?

• C

• C++

• Python

• JavaScript

• PHP

• SQL

• Go

• PowerShell

• Ruby

5. What Programming Languages to Learn to Work in Robotics?

• C

• C++

• Python

• Java

• C#

• Matlab

• HDLs

• LISP and Prolog

• Industrial Robot Languages like Kuka, INFORM, RAPID, Karel, etc…

5. What Programming Languages to Learn in Work Cloud Computing as a Cloud Developer?

• Python

• C#

• Go

• Ruby

• Java

• C++

• PHO

• NET

• JavaScript

6. What Programming Languages to Learn in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Ecosystems and Apps?

• C#

• C/C++

• Java

• JavaScript

• Python

• Swift

• Unity

7. What Programming Languages to Learn to work in Datascience?

• Python

• R

• Julia

• Java

• JavaScript

• C/C++

• Scala

• SAS

8. What Programming Languages to Learn to work in Quantum Computing?

Classical computing:

• JavaScript

• C/C++

• Python

• Pascal

• Cirq (Google)

• ‍Qiskit (IBM)

• ‍Ocean (D-Wave)

Quantum Languages:

• Quantum Computing Language

• QMASM: Quantum Macro Assembler

• Sliq

• Quantum SDKs (Software Development Kits)

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Now that we are doing with a quick summary of typical programming choices for different fields. Let’s take a look at some of the actual trends in 2022 that I have noticed and find relevant. Feel free to add more in the comments section.

2. Open Source Coding

Open-source coding and community backed by BigTech remains the dominant trend in how software is becoming democratized in the world. It stimulates how software languages are learned (Bootcamps, online courses, DIY, University programs) and so forth. Open-Source hubs remain an accelerating and growing trend into the 2020s.

3. The Rise of Newer Programming Languages

More recent innovations in coding relate to newer programming languages where adoption has real and powerful reasons for happening. I’m no expert but I’d consider the following in this group:

• Typescript

• Rust

• Kotlin

• Go

• Elm

• Julia

• And Others?

You will notice that these often have a BigTech company behind them pushing their adoption also for strategic business and corporate reasons.

I’m sure you are familiar with them, but let’s take a quick sneak peak of a few of them in slightly more depth just the same:

TYPESCRIPT

Microsoft maintains TypeScript, an open-source static type framework designed on top of JavaScript. TypeScript is an object-oriented language that was developed to extend the functionality of JS. It is a superset of JavaScript. Developers can find it simple to write and maintain code using this language. To avoid runtime bugs, the Typescript compiler tests for type discrepancies and filters out compile-time errors. It’s also systematic and easy to grasp. Its extensive toolkit speeds up application growth.

ELM

What started as a Harvard student’s thesis has evolved to become a source of fascination for front-end developers all over the world. Elm collates to JavaScript, making it suitable for creating UIs that run quickly and with no errors. Elm is a functional programming language that lets developers build client-side frameworks without having to deal with the declarative aspects of HTML and CSS.

JULIA

Julia is a high-level programming language for computational science and numerical analysis. It comes with a large mathematical feature library, a parallel and distributed execution program, a sophisticated compiler, and numerical precision. Julia is intended to overcome the limitations of Python and other computational programming and data processing languages and applications.

KOTLIN

Kotlin is widely used for Android app creation, web application development, desktop application development, and server-side application development. Kotlin was created to be a better programming language than Java, and its users agree. Kotlin is used in the majority of Google’s applications. Coursera, Pinterest, and PostMates are among the organizations that use Kotlin as their programming language.

Other New Programming Languages You May be Less Familiar With

• Pony

• Nim

• Elixir

• Reason

• Dart

• PureScript, and so forth…

Of course it’s always debatable what constitutes “new” in programming terms and software engineering history.

4. Businesses Focus on Cybersecurity as a Increasingly Mission Critical

Cybersecurity in a world in a state of war readiness will gain popularity as a legit software development trend which is expected to grow more in 2022. Businesses will need to focus more on the modernization of their systems, applications, and technology stack with regular assessments for cybersecurity. 

Just like climate change is becoming more costly, the same could be said about security vulnerabilities. Think about it, Internet security is now among the most important topics in IT of our time. Cybersecurity Ventures estimated that ransomware attacks would account for approximately $20 billion in global corporate losses in 2021.

There’s a real acknowledgement that legacy systems and even U.S. businesses are at risk. To be honest, cybersecurity conundrum is causing anxiety-inducing insecurity among many business and government leaders.

For instance, the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently addressed that the threats are weighing on the minds of executives and academics. In a recent report, it stated: “Cybersecurity complaints to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation more than tripled during the pandemic last year, while the average payment by victims of ransomware jumped 43% in the first quarter of 2021 from the preceding quarter.

With the U.S. sanctioning Russia aggressively in early 2022, this is going to become a bigger deal that will impact the future of software trends as well.

5. Young Developers are Self-Selecting to work in Newer Industries and more Recent developments on the Internet

With the young and new ideologies such as the movement towards decentralization, distributed teams and inclusion, where young developers WANT to work is also impacting the future of software and programming languages and how they develop.

I think I can capture it with some LinkedIn Polls I’m running, I’ll screenshot the results here:

If you are interested in participating, please fill out the following Polls:

Poll 1

Poll 2

Poll 3

Follow Michael Spencer’s Polls on Linkedin.

• This series of Polls started March 13th, 2022 (you are eligible to vote for the next two weeks)

6. Web 3.0 and Metaverse Hype

2022 has been a year of social media amplification, whether it’s the Metaverse in the first two months of the year or the Ukraine war recently. That being said, Web 3.0 and Metaverse hype is getting a lot more debate whether that’s on Reddit (where presumably real debate takes place), Twitter or elsewhere.

BigTech acquiring Metaverse and blockchain assets also adds to this debate as now Microsoft has acquired GitHub, Activision and more or less OpenAI ($1 Billion in funding), that fuels this debate even more. Facebook calling itself Meta and Square calling itself Block just makes it all a bit more ridiculous.

While these ecosystems of the future are supposed to democratize software and liberate us from the legacy internet and old social media and search, it’s not clear if this will actually take place with the same companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon dominating mega-trends of the Internet such as Cloud, Ads and developer and Software Engineer talent onboarding.

I’d argue that Web 3.0 and Metaverse hype is also shaping in a subtle way the future of software languages and programming that needs to adapt to the future.

7. Low Code/No Code and Well, AI that Codes

With the quick adoption of RPA in business, there’s going to be a much greater emphasis on democratizing software to non-coders and in automating tasks that people don’t actually need to do with AI adoption in organizations, companies and with the continued evolution of the Cloud.

AI that Codes as a sector is going to see some incredible VC money coming its way since it has the potential to automate many of our day-to-day operations in many departments whether that’s HR, admin, marketing and so forth.

As the algorithms inside LowCode/NoCode/CodeGen tools become more sophisticated we will also see developers augmented with AI-buddy systems that allow them to be more productive and transform DevOps and various tasks related to datascience in general. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, along with a great deal of empty hype as well.

8. Digital Transformation Accelerating

Whether it’s the pandemic lock-downs, the Great Resignation or simply choosing to work remotely and work from home more, the tools we use in society and in technology are changing quickly. This is impacting also the demand for software developers and software engineers.

I’ve read some whacky stuff about how A.I. and IoT are converging in a kind of Internet of Behavior IoB internet. This is like an era of ambient computing that will slowly arrive even in retail, hospitality, healthcare and education.

I think the term Digital Transformation probably best summarizes this movement of convenience and A.I. personalizing our experience in different domains and layers of the internet.

You could also argue that BigTech is opportunistic when it comes to Cloud adoption and even the Great Resignation and pandemic lock-down environments. More bells and whistles and tools means more demand for software engineers.

There’s a point where Cloud computing, IoT, on-demand services, FinTech, A.I. and other things converge and that acceleration is increasing demand for qualified coders, developers and software engineers.

9. Adoption of More Popular Programming Languages

I’ve written a lot in this Newsletter about how more popular languages find greater adoption and more support from BigTech which populiarzes a coding language to be used even more.

The best example in recent years is most likely Rust.

Despite its relative youth, Rust has steadily risen in the ranks of popular programming languages. In fact, while it ranked 33 in July 2019, by July 2020 it had risen to the 18th spot on the TIOBE Programming Community Index. Similarly, according to Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Rust has been the “most loved” language since 2016.

A lot of why a programming language is loved is due to a great community and an uplifting ideology. Rust’s principles is a pretty good example of this don’t you find?

Principled behavior for Rust

In building Rust, the Rust community has evolved the “Rustacean Principles” to balance sometimes competing development priorities. They are:

• “Reliable: If it compiles, it works.”

• “Performant: Idiomatic code runs efficiently.”

• “Supportive: The language, tools, and community are here to help.”

• “Productive: A little effort does a lot of work.”

• “Transparent: You can predict and control low-level details.”

• “Versatile: You can do anything with Rust.”

Why Should you Learn Rust?

I literally could go on and on, but I’m reaching Substack’s Email length limit.

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