Popularity of Programming Languages for Data Science

Below is a link to a study I found on kdnuggets.com. This is a useful website if you are interested in data science. The study is from October, 2016 so is fairly current. It is based on data from indeed.com as my earlier post was. It shows once again that Python, Java and R are the most popular programming languages for data science. Keep in mind , however, that R is a domain specific language for statistical computing. Unfortunately this study did not include commercial software, only open source. Thus SAS, etc. are not included.

KDNuggets - most popular languages for data science

Popularity of some programming languages/IT skills

What follows is a little survey I did on indeed.com on 4/28/17. I started off just looking for the popularity of the R language for data science but wound up broadening the search terms. I limited the search to my home state of California. It is not in  any way a scientific survey but it did prove interesting as far as it went. R ranked pretty high. Right behind Python and ahead of C++. C and SQL were the top two languages. Java was 3rd. We already offer a short coding class in Java and are developing one in Python. Perhaps we will do R next. A couple other observations are that the open languages are firmly in the lead. SAS had the most mentions of the commercial statistical packages.

I often say that SQL is a foundation skill for data analysis. This survey seems to bear that out. To that I would add Python and/or R for those interested in a data science career.

skill/term	indeed mentions
microsoft excel	28,420
c	23,962
sql	15,825
linux	14,165
java	13,769
python	12,835
r	9,826
c++	8,771
javascript	8,619
microsoft access	8,199
bi	7,778
hadoop	4,461
ruby	3,715
sas	3,602
mysql	3,601
tableau	3,413
business intelligence	3,390
spark	3,284
rails	2,677
epic	2,618
matlab	2,141
etl	1,726
scala	1,685
django	668
oracle	542
spss	538
minitab	273
stata	236
cobol	135
fortran	132
medisoft	20
statistica	7