For the fourth year in a row Python has emerged as the most popular language on a site that sets coding challenges. It has a community of over 40,000 developers and is used by over 2,000 employers to screen job candidates. 

CodeEval is a resource for both sides of the employment exchange. Devs sign up to prepare for job interviews and to showcase their skills to potential employers and employers sign up to find those who have the programming abilities they need and to get noticed by the developer community. And some devs join in just for the fun of the chase, or rather the ranking.

CodeEval has collected data on language popularity for 4 years and Python has consistently come top, with Java and C++ claiming 2nd and 3rd positions. This diagram shows the relative popularity of the 19 languages its platform supports:

Is this really a good indicator of how important languages are?

CodeEval is rather modest about its rankings. It's blog post about the latest results concludes: 

TIBOE is a more accurate measure of language market share compared to the CodeEval index which is a much better indicator for language demand in the industry which can help people predict which languages are going to grow in popularity. 

What employers want is probably a very practical measure of popularity and so CodeEval's rankings certainly mean something.

The findings are obviously skewed by the languages it supports. Noting the rise in the popularity of R, something we recently reported, see R Heads For Top Ten Languages, CodeEval notes that that fact it has only supported it on its platform since December 2014 explains its current ranking of 17 of 19. Visual Basic .NET was added at the same time, accounting for its position at the very bottom of the list. 

It also notes that Objective-C, Bash, and Lua, which all made triple digit gains in the rankings, are relatively new languages on its platform and make up only about 1% of submissions.

Commenting on changes in the rankings between this year and last, the blog states:

This year's most noticeable changes were a 47% increase in C# submissions, a 25% surge in Javascript, as well as a 48% increase in C submissions. We saw a 25% drop in C++ submissions as well as a 33% decline in Ruby usage. 

With over 30% share, and a 3% increase on 2014, Python is certainly well established as the most popular language on CodeEval reflecting the idea is that a language that is in demand by employers and firmly embraced by developers.

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