Developer technology trends 2026
Cross-referenced data from 14 independent sources: which technologies are rising, which are falling, and what it means for hiring and contract demand.
Key insights
The most significant trends from cross-referencing every source.
Pinecone grew 145% year over year on DB-Engines. AI/ML workloads are driving demand for specialised vector storage. Database trends →
jQuery runs on 70.0% of websites, versus React on 6.2%. That gap is a large modernisation market: plenty of production code still predates today’s frameworks.
Databricks, DuckDB, Snowflake are averaging 37% year-over-year growth on DB-Engines. Demand for data engineering follows this curve.
“Who’s Hiring” post volume fell for nearly every technology we track (for example Python −47.6% and Java −68.3% year over year). That is a platform trend, not a verdict on any one technology. Hiring trends →
Hono npm downloads grew 399% quarter over quarter. Other fast risers: Anthropic SDK, Next.js, Drizzle.
Language rankings across sources
Community activity (TIOBE), tutorial searches (PYPL), real websites (W3Techs) and hiring demand (Hacker News, job postings) rarely agree. Read them together.
TIOBE Index: top 20
Rating = share of search-engine query volume for each language. TIOBE has been updated monthly since 2001.
| Language | TIOBE rank | TIOBE change | PYPL rank | PYPL trend | Websites | HN mentions | HN YoY | Jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | #1 | −2.59% | #1 | +1.2% | 1.2% | 5,803 | −47.6% | 114,352 |
| C | #2 | +2.02% | – | – | <0.1% | – | – | – |
| C++ | #3 | −2.90% | #2 | +11.6% | <0.1% | – | – | 29,356 |
| Java | #4 | −2.37% | #4 | −3.3% | 5.4% | 6,091 | −68.3% | 36,662 |
| C# | #5 | +1.49% | #6 | +0.2% | – | – | – | – |
| JavaScript | #6 | −0.01% | #5 | −0.2% | 5.9% | – | – | 25,959 |
| Visual Basic | #7 | −0.02% | #9 | +1.0% | – | – | – | – |
| R | #9 | +0.94% | #3 | +9.3% | – | – | – | – |
| Perl | #11 | +1.05% | #27 | +0.0% | 0.1% | – | – | – |
| Rust | #14 | +0.09% | #8 | +1.0% | – | 1,167 | −48.0% | 5,378 |
| MATLAB | #15 | +0.31% | #14 | −0.8% | – | – | – | – |
| Go | #16 | −1.49% | #24 | +0.0% | <0.1% | 3,339 | −41.1% | 12,695 |
| PHP | #18 | −0.25% | #11 | +0.6% | 71.7% | 1,396 | −8.3% | 7,675 |
| Ada | #19 | +0.25% | #13 | +0.5% | <0.1% | – | – | – |
| Swift | #20 | +0.44% | #7 | +1.3% | – | 702 | −58.3% | 2,416 |
| Kotlin | #22 | – | #22 | +0.0% | – | 362 | −52.9% | 2,475 |
| COBOL | #24 | – | #15 | +0.3% | – | – | – | – |
| Dart | #25 | – | #19 | +0.1% | – | – | – | – |
| Lisp | #26 | – | – | – | <0.1% | – | – | – |
| Julia | #29 | – | #25 | +0.0% | – | – | – | – |
| Ruby | #30 | – | #17 | +0.2% | 6.7% | 5,270 | −54.2% | 3,362 |
| Objective-C | #31 | – | #10 | +0.9% | – | – | – | – |
| Lua | #32 | – | #21 | +0.0% | <0.1% | – | – | – |
| PowerShell | #33 | – | #18 | +0.1% | – | – | – | – |
| Erlang | #34 | – | – | – | <0.1% | – | – | – |
| TypeScript | #35 | – | #12 | −0.7% | – | 1,341 | −47.9% | 17,904 |
| ABAP | #36 | – | #17 | −0.5% | – | – | – | – |
| Scala | #38 | – | #23 | +0.0% | 5.0% | – | – | 3,614 |
| Haskell | #42 | – | #25 | +0.0% | <0.1% | – | – | – |
| Zig | #48 | – | #24 | +0.0% | – | – | – | – |
Languages that appear in at least two of TIOBE (search engine activity), PYPL (Google tutorial searches), W3Techs (server-side language on websites) and Hacker News “Who’s Hiring” threads. Job postings are TheirStack per-technology counts. Click a column to sort.
Rising and falling technologies
Only technologies with consistent signals across at least two independent sources make these lists.
Rising: multi-source momentum
- C: TIOBE rank +50.0, TIOBE rating +10.1, Job boards +10.0
- R: TIOBE rank +43.8, TIOBE rating +4.7, PYPL trend +9.3
Average of directional signals: TIOBE rank and rating change, PYPL trend, HN hiring YoY and job-board demand. We require at least two signals and exclude legacy languages whose TIOBE moves are mostly noise.
Falling: consistent decline
No technology currently shows a consistent decline across multiple independent sources. Hacker News hiring volume fell broadly over this period, but that reflects the platform, not technology-specific weakness. Every candidate below also has a positive signal, usually live job-board demand, so we do not flag it as declining.
Show the 15 candidates we ruled out
| Technology | Avg signal | Signals |
|---|---|---|
| Ruby | −50.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0 |
| Next.js | −31.2 | HN hiring YoY −31.2 |
| Kotlin | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| Angular | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| Vue | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| iOS | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| Android | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| .NET | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| Django | −20.0 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| Go | −19.6 | TIOBE rank −50.0, TIOBE rating −7.5, HN hiring YoY −41.1, Job boards +20.0 |
| Kubernetes | −18.0 | HN hiring YoY −46.0, Job boards +10.0 |
| Node.js | −17.5 | HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +15.0 |
| Java | −16.7 | TIOBE rank −33.3, TIOBE rating −11.9, PYPL trend −3.3, HN hiring YoY −50.0, Job boards +15.0 |
| AI/ML | −16.6 | HN hiring YoY −48.2, Job boards +15.0 |
| Terraform | −14.2 | HN hiring YoY −38.5, Job boards +10.0 |
Looking for technologies your team may struggle to staff in a few years? See the technology lifecycle report.
Database trends
DB-Engines tracks 431 database systems. Here is where the market is moving.
Top 15 by DB-Engines popularity score
Fastest growing (year over year)
Score change over 12 months on DB-Engines. Pinecone and Databricks lead the growth curve as AI/ML and analytics workloads drive demand for specialised databases.
Web technology market share
W3Techs measures what websites actually run, not what developers say in surveys.
Server-side Language
CSS Framework
JavaScript Library
Web Server
CMS
Share of all websites using each technology, detected daily across millions of sites. A site can use several technologies, so shares within a category can add up to more than 100%.
Package ecosystem momentum
npm download trends: what developers are adopting and abandoning right now.
Fastest growing
Last 13 weeks vs the prior 13. Hono (+399%), Anthropic SDK (+72%), Next.js (+53%) show the strongest acceleration.
Most downloaded (per week)
Average weekly npm downloads over the last 13 weeks.
Declining
Deprecated packages (request) and legacy tools (Gulp, Moment.js, Grunt) keep losing downloads.
Methodology
Sources
- TIOBE Index (monthly language ranking since 2001)
- PYPL Index (Google Trends tutorial search frequency)
- DB-Engines (database popularity ranking)
- W3Techs (real-world website technology detection)
- Hacker News Who's Hiring (job demand signal)
- Stack Overflow (developer Q&A activity)
- GitHub (trending repos and hiring signals)
- npm + PyPI (package download trends)
- Upwork (project demand by technology)
- RemoteOK (remote job postings)
- Adzuna + Remotive (job board aggregation)
- Freelancer.com (project demand)
- Indeed Hiring Lab (sector-level job posting index)
- TheirStack (per-technology job counts, 325k+ sources)
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