Most important programming languages for developers in South Africa

South African software developers looking to improve their employability and potentially also their salary should hone their coding skills in Microsoft’s C#, according to OfferZen’s State of the South African Developer Nation report for 2024.

Based on a survey of 3,935 software developers currently living in South Africa between October and November 2023, the tech employment agency found that C# had become signficantly more in-demand and used locally than a year ago.

“Overall, C#’s desirability increased across frontend, backend, and full stack developers, indicating its broad appeal to the local tech community,” OfferZen said.

The company said the fact that nearly half of the developers it surveyed said career opportunities played the most important role in what language they chose to learn next might explain C#’s appeal.

C# provides access to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and career opportunities at numerous companies that use its tech as part of their stack.

Offerzen’s survey found C# surpassed TypeScript to become the second most in-demand language South African developers wanted to learn.

Where 23.8% of respondents wanted to learn the language in the 2023 report, 25.0% wanted to learn it in the latest survey.

Python retained its position as the most desired language overall, but this time around, it only appealed to 33.1% of surveyed developers, compared with 35.6% in 2023’s report.

The third, fourth, and fifth most wanted languages were Go, JavaScript, and Java.

When zooming in on backend developers specifically, C# also increased its appeal from 22.3% to 23.9% of the participants.

It ranked third overall for backend developers, behind Google’s Go, which appealed to 26.5% of the participants.

However, both those languages declined in popularity from the previous year, with Python dropping by a substantial 6.1 percentage points and Go declining by 0.7 percentage points.

The most widely used programming language continues to be JavaScript.

54.5% of the respondents said they used the language, down one percentage point from the previous year’s survey.

The next three most used languages’ recorded increased adoption.

Among the survey participants, C# penetration grew from 36.2% to 37.9%, TypeScript usage climbed from 33.8% to 36.0%, and Python usage surged from 28.2% to 31.0%.

The graphs below show the most in-demand and most used programming languages among software developers surveyed by OfferZen.

OfferZen also analysed the popularity and usage of programming frameworks among South African developers.

React remained the most wanted choice overall — appealing to 20.9% of the respondents.

While its demand fell from 22.5%, this could be explained by the fact that the framework was already adopted by a higher number of developers — 20.4% in the latest survey compared with 19.1% of respondents in the 2023 report.

Second-placed Angular increased its appeal to developers from a 19.5% share in the previous report to 19.8% in the latest survey. However, its actual usage declined from 19.8% to 18.4%.

Flutter, ASP.net, and Node.js all declined in demand from the previous report, while only ASP.net recorded an increase in usage.

Most popular languages in the world

Offerzen’s findings differ slightly from the global trends observed by TIOBE.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index also found that Python was the most popular language with a rating of 18.04%.

The language recorded an impressive 4.71 percentage point increase in adoption from August 2023 to August 2024.

However, TIOBE observed a 0.65 percentage point decline in C# usage, while finding that C++ and C were the second and third most popular languages.

Aside from geographical differences, the deviation between Offerzen and TIOBE could be explained by the different methodologies.

TIOBE explains that its index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code are written but is more of a general indicator of popularity.

Instead of surveying software engineers, it uses popular websites like Amazon, Bing, Google, Wikipedia, and 20 others to calculate ratings based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors using particular languages.

The table below shows TIOBE’s latest index of the top 10 most popular programming languages in the world in August 2024 and how their share of adoption changed from a year ago.