I landed on Stack Overflow a few minutes ago looking for an answer to something and I saw that the 2023 Developer Survey came out this past week.

I thought this new metric or representation was interesting:

2023 Developer Survey Admired Languages

The blue dot is the number of people who haven’t used a language but want to (SO calls that “desired”). The red dot is people who have used a language and want to continue using it in the future (SO calls that “admired”).

Rust is now in the 8th year as the most “admired” language (in previous years they called it “loved”). I’m a Rust fan so that is gratifying to see.

JavaScript seems to have the narrowest band between “desired” and “admired” which I take to mean that a lot of people want to try it but quickly realize they don’t like it once they do. I prefer TypeScript for bigger OOP-style projects but I think JavaScript gets a bad rap really. I find JavaScript really elegant and fast to develop in with the least amount friction between wanting to do something and expressing it concisely in code (particularly with all the features added in the five versions between ECMAScript 2015 to 2019. )