Now in this episode, I want to cover my top programming

languages for 2020.

And I think it's important to recognize that you can

evaluate a programming languages

in a number of different ways.

For example, whether it is useful, practical,

or whether it can get you a job.

And in the past year, the landscape

for software engineering has changed so much.

In my opinion, I wanted to give an update on what I think

are the most relevant languages

and technologies that you need to know.

Quick pause.

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All right, so first step, what is my number one

programming language?

Which language with I personally

want to know and learn in 2020?

And I know that there are some popular ones,

you may be thinking, well, there's Python

that seems very useful.

Everybody says Python is good.

I've said that JavaScript is very good as well before too,

but it's not what I would want to know.

I think they're great languages very useful, but personally

for me, I would go with the Swift iOS mobile development

and you may be wondering why.

And the reason really is competition.

In my opinion when you're learning a language like Swift

or Objective C for iOS mobile development,

the barrier to entry for this is actually quite high.

For example, number one, you need a MacBook,

you may need a membership to the Apple developer program

that's like $100 per year.

And so this creates a barrier to entry that actually

helps make it such that when you go and apply to jobs,

you're not competing against the billions of people

out there all the outsourced workers, all the other students

who may be flooding into the US from say foreign markets.

There's so many talented people out there in the world.

To me, it's an uphill battle.

And it's just the market dynamics at work.

iOS, mobile development, if you can get in, it's really

quite pleasant, actually, you get great hardware,

great technologies.

Usually the iOS code is cleaner

than the Android counterparts, at least as far as I've seen,

and it positions you were to land the role

at top tier tech company like say Facebook, Google, Apple.

Because a lot of these companies, they want

the mobile native developers to be churning out really

high quality performance code.

They don't really want like React native

type of hybrid code.

And in my opinion, mobile native development is still pretty

decent area to be in, although the heyday has come and gone.

App development these days is more difficult

than it was before and there's a lot more things

you have to take into consideration.

Like you have to make sure your code works for iPad, iPhone,

dark mode, light mode, accessibility, all sorts of different

screen sizes, dynamic text sizes, internationalization,

UI human interface design patterns.

So developing mobile apps may have a steeper learning curve,

you could be doing your own memory management,

doing distributed processing across multiple threads,

handling UI and scale performance issues layouts,

but still I just personally prefer the smaller playground

as the iOS developer community.

So overall, iOS development comes in at number one for me

not because it is the most practical language

but because it is a language with the largest

moat around it because you have to essentially shell out

$2000 for a MacBook Pro, pick up the Apple developer

program and that just locks out a lot of other people

and competition when you're applying to jobs.

Now, coming up at number two, I would put Kotlin, or Java,

Android development as the next technology to know.

And I say this because when I was working over at Google,

and then later at Facebook, I kept hearing people say

that there is a shortage of Android developers.

So Android development, it's in demand

at these FAANG companies, not to mention

the languages used like Java, Kotlin.

I mean, they're pretty decent, Kotlin is actually

quite nice, as well as a very modern language.

And Android has only been gaining market share against iOS.

Not to mention most internet browsing activity these days

has shifted from desktop over onto mobile.

So native mobile app development.

While it may not be that important for say a startup,

which maybe just needs a web presence, for these large

top tier tech companies, it is the primary battle ground

because they absolutely need to win on these platforms

and it is very important, they're making

their apps as fast as possible.

And for example, if you're working on say, the Facebook app

or the YouTube app, these mobile versions

and the developers behind they are just given

higher priority, they're given the spotlight,

compared to say, the web counterparts who are working

on site, the JavaScript versions, which usually, you know,

people are trying to push people off of their web versions

onto the mobile versions of these apps.

All right, so moving on, language number three.

Well, if you're to ask me, what is the most

practical language to know?

The one that you didn't have to worry about trying

to apply for a job, but if you just want to know it,

and then become an entrepreneur through that,

I would say JavaScript is the way to go.

Because you can just get so much done with it.

These days, you can build the complete back end

using JavaScript, you can use Node JS on the back end,

you can build the beautiful front end and website

using JavaScript, connect to a whole bunch

of different API's connect to a database.

And so if you're a small time developer, you want to build

the prototype a proof of concept, then JavaScript

can get you going, you build a simple website,

you don't necessarily need a full mobile native application

unless it's something specific you're trying to do.

But you can actually get a whole bunch done using,

say just JavaScript in building a website.

Now there are some problems with JavaScript,

number one it's pretty easy, there's no barrier to entry,

pretty much everybody and their grandmother

knows JavaScript these days.

And then the other thing is you have framework hell

in which you could be going through React at JS Angular,

View, so there could be a host Leo frameworks,

not to mention these days, people are trying to write

in TypeScript, which provides static typing

on top of normal standard JavaScript.

So there's no single one correct way to write JavaScript.

there could be more churn because you could be learning

different things, different ways of writing, you could

become very good as a Angular and then your next step

you need to write in React, or TypeScript

or no-js and so forth.

You could even do some native app development

using React Native writing in JavaScript.

Although these days I think that due to higher demands

for say performance and quality people have been

going for more purely native approaches instead

of building on top of another framework like that.

Okay, moving on.

Well, recently I was asked by a school professor

which language he should teach the students,

he had been teaching in Java.

And he was saying that it felt a little bit outdated.

What language should be universally

taught to just everybody?

And in my opinion, that would be Python.

Because Python is just something that everybody can use.

It's a very general and useful language.

It can be used for web backend development.

You got YouTube and Instagram being powered

on Python back ends.

It could be used for scripting, like if you want to wrap

on your internal scripts and tools, Cron back end jobs,

it could be used for data analytics, making SQL queries,

building up data pipelines, data engineering,

it could be used for machine learning as well.

As well as virtually every single API endpoint out there,

allows you to interact with it through a Python library.

So it's a great language, very simple to learn and read.

And this is the language that we also use for our course,

by the way techinterviewpro.com and which we teach you

how to pass the coding interview.

So check that out if you're interested.

Now for my fifth language, and this is where things

get a little bit interesting for 2020 opinion

because my pic is not really so much language

but the technology of server less platforms out there.

For example, if you want to build a real time back end

for your chat application, well, sure, you can go learn

no-js or Golang, but instead,

you could also just use Firebase.

And so back end services like this, essentially,

replace your entire need to go learn a new language

like no-js, and figure out how to scale that whole thing

out, make it secure, and everything.

If you want to build a beautiful landing page,

you can use like say Squarespace.

If you need email marketing, there are services for that,

if you need video uploads, image uploads, chat services,

payment services, well back in the day, you may use Stripe

to do credit card processing, wire up their API using

say Python connected to some back end

and to have that fill out some email form.

But these days, you can get all of that all set up.

You could use API services, like say, Zapier

that essentially glue multiple pieces together

such that many times you don't necessarily need to even

be coding a lot of this stuff.

So platforms and services have matured

to a point that if you're smart, you're able to utilize

these services out there instead of rebuilding things

from scratch over and over.

And that can actually save you from having to learn

additional languages if you can just use

these other services.

And then another new thing I would say for this year,

maybe number six is the language of social media

in which you know how to promote your apps or products

or services using Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn,

Facebook, TikTok or Snapchat.

I think that 2020 will be the year of these social media

platforms, essentially just dominating

a lot of internet traffic.

And if you're a developer, and you're out to promote

your app or platform, then you need to know how to navigate

these social media platforms,

and this is an essential skill.

And I may have mentioned this before,

but back in the old days, if you had a website,

oftentimes people would just build an iOS app.

And it would just be a shell, a wrapper on your website.

And the whole goal of that was to get your website

into the app store as an app such that you get more traffic

for your website that people would visit there.

Maybe they put a little app bookmark on their homepage,

and you would have to call up the shelf for that.

So the whole goal of learning iOS development

was simply distribution power.

These days, if you want the distribution power,

the language to know is that of social media.

And then after that, I would say my next language to know

would be SQL, the database coding language,

because these days, there's just so much data that,

there's a high need for data engineers, data analysts,

people are able to query these databases,