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C++ Trends & Demand for Developers

C is a middle level programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie during the 1970’s in his time at AT&T Bell Labs. He was seeking to redesign the UNIX operating system designed by Ken Thompson two years prior to enable the system to be used on multiple computers. The new language C offered both high-level functionality and the detailed features required to program an operating system.
The inception of C++ began in 1979 when Bjarne Stroustrup was working on his Ph.D. thesis. Bjarne was fascinated by object-orientated approach and began working on C with classes; he started to create a new language that had the features of C and the object-orientated paradigm. C++ was first coined in 1983 and was officially released in October of 1985.

• C++ was officially standardised in 1998 and has continually evolved with major revisions taking place in 2003, 2011, 2014 and 2017. C++ is often mislabelled as an object-orientated language, it is actually a concept independent programming language. From a developer’s perspective, C++ is a notoriously complex language to master for a variety of reasons.
• For one, you have to come up with your own strategy, structure, and methodology when you use C++, there is no hints that tell you how to write your code. Whereas other languages are purposely deigned to be easy and quick to learn, C++ is the total opposite.
• C++ is powerful, fast and effective providing excellent concurrency support. C++ is great for applications where high performance and low latency are priority. It supports a wide range of applications from 3D graphics in games to real-time mathematical solutions for finance. Its versatile nature has led to C++ spreading to a multitude of different industries from transportation to manufacturing to game development.
• C++ is a staple language in the software development sphere maintaining its popularity and demand for year after year. In today’s climate, new technologies, frameworks and languages are consistently emerging, often disrupting the market causing the popularity of other languages to dissipate. C++ seems to hold its own with developers wanting to learn the language and employers looking for developers with C++ in their tech stack.
• TIOBE Index ranked C++ as the third most popular language of 2018, just behind Java and C. C++ has maintained this third-place spot since 2002. PYPL, a survey that looks at how often language tutorials are searched for on Google has C++ ranked in sixth place signifying that developers are actively upskilling their C++ skills. This is further substantiated by GitHub’s “Language Wanted” rankings, languages that developers have not learned yet but wish to in the future. C++ was ranked in 6th place again with 10% of GitHub’s community stating they intend to learn the language.
• Demand for C++ professionals is constant as it is used in so many different industries. One method of calculating demand for C++ professionals to analyse job data citing C++ as a requirement. C++ came in fourth in terms of IT jobs citing the language as a requirement, just behind JavaScript on Indeed, the world’s largest search engine for jobs. We have seen demand increase for C++ professionals for roles such a game software engineer, system software developer and embedded engineer.
• There have been warnings that C++ will inevitably fade out of existence as technology and other languages continue to emerge. C++’s ability to run legacy code may no longer hold value in the future. However, we have seen employers favouring C++ as programmers can be more productive using a basic language that fits so many applications. The future is yet to be written for C++ but demand for and popularity of the language has stagnated since 2013 without any indications of this trend improving going forward.

C++ Language Trends

You've probably heard of C++ (pronounced see-plus-plus), but how popular is this programming language? And should you be learning it this year? Created back in 1985, C++ literally means ‘increased C’ (technically, it’s the C language but with classes added), which indicates its evolution from the C language. So, should you be learning C++ in 2018?
Despite the popularity of other programming languages like Java (interestingly, C++ tends to execute faster than Java), C++ can still hold its own as a widely used language for scripting with many applications including:

• Games: C++ is frequently used in the the development of gaming engines. The science fiction game Doom 3 uses C++, so too Unreal Engine, a suite of integrated tools for game developers to design and build games,simulations, and visualisations.
• Graphic User Interface (GUI) applications: Many common applications, including Image Reader, Photoshop and Illustrator, are scripted in C++.
• Web Browsers: Although C++ is limited for scripting websites (PHP and Java tend to be preferred for web development), it is still used when speed and reliability are needed. A part of Google’s back-end is coded in C++, for example.
• Advanced Computation and Graphics: C++ can build apps that need real-time physical simulations, high performance image processing and mobile sensor applications.
• Operating Systems: C++ forms a vital part of multiple operating systems including Apple’s OS and some versions of Windows.
  Banking and trading applications: This includes some apps used by Bloomberg and Reuters.
• As you can see, C++ has a wide range of uses. It’s regarded as a highly efficient and flexible language, according to an article in Medium, and here’s the good news: you don’t need to know another programming language before learning C++ in 2018.
• Although having said this, the feeling is that C++ is fairly tricky for newbie developers to pick up, because it’s close to C, which is a lower-level language (i.e. close to machine language). Watch this YouTube video to find our more about the relative difficulty of learning C++.
  Popularity of C++ in 2018
• The TIOBE index looks at the popularity of various programming languages. This is determined by looking at the following variables: number of skilled engineers in a particular language world-wide, courses offered in that language and third party vendors.
• This information is combined with popular search engine results for the different languages on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, etc., For April 2018, same as April 2017, C++ was ranked as the 3rd most popular language.