CircleCI has published its report with the most used programming languages in DevOps development. This firm supports more than 2 million developers running 90 million build, test, and deployment jobs each month.
In the annual “State of Software Delivery” report, what this firm does is analyze data from more than 250 million workflows. And one of the main conclusions is that TypeScript has been the most used in the last year to develop DevOps.
In 2019, as you can see in the graph, Javascript was the most used, which has now dropped to second place, followed by Ruby, which in two years has fallen to third place. After this Top 3 we have that Python remains as the fourth programming language most used for DevOps projects. Regarding Python, it has established itself as the favorite programming language according to TIOBE and C, thanks to its performance, it follows closely
Millions of workflows
Data used in the “2022 State of Software Delivery” report represents executed workflows between December 1, 2019 and September 30, 2021. Filtered to only include projects that use GitHub as their VCS, have at least two collaborators, and have run workflows on CircleCI at least five times.
This report explains that to make it to the top 25 programming languages on this list, a language must used in over 150,000 workflow runs. Millions of uses are needed to reach the top 10.
Typescript overtakes Javascript as most popular DevOps language
TypeScript, say the report’s authors, “is a superset of the very popular JavaScript programming language that adds optional static typing.” Since its introduction by Microsoft in 2012, it has been rapidly adopted by developers as a scalable, human-readable language that facilitates collaboration and accelerates development.
Since JavaScript code is valid for TypeScript, migrating a JavaScript code base to TypeScript is relatively easy. Teams that have recently completed migrations to large scale from JavaScript to TypeScript include Stripe, Airbnb and Etsy.
Developers appreciate TypeScript because it offers type safety that allows developers to detect errors directly in their IDE (Integrated Development Environment) instead of at runtime, which reduces the risk of sending production errors. They also allow for quick onboarding and collaboration across projects, so productivity and reliability have been key to enterprise-level adoption of TypeScript.