The 25 Hottest Technologies in Q2 2016

Jul 11, 2016

Based on the number of active StackOverflow posts, the 25 hottest technologies of Q2, 2016 are:

1. JavaScript – 11.7%
2. Java – 9.9%
3. Android – 8.6%
4. PHP – 7.5%
5. C# – 7.2%
6. Python – 6.8%
7. jQuery – 5.2%
8. HTML – 5.0%
9. iOS – 4.3%
10. CSS – 3.5%
11. C++ – 3.4%
12. MySQL – 3.1%
13. AngularJS – 3.1%
14. SQL – 2.4%
15. Swift – 2.3%
16. Node.Js – 2.1%
17. R – 2.0%
18. JSON – 1.8%
19. Ruby on Rails – 1.7%
20. ASP.NET – 1.7%
21. C – 1.5%
22. SQL Server – 1.5%
23. Objective-C – 1.4%
24. .NET – 1.3%
25. Excel – 1.2%

The percentages in the list above show the percentage of active posts tagged with that tag compared to all the active posts tagged with any of the top 25 tags. For example, in the second quarter of 2016, there were 96,315 active posts tagged with JavaScript and a total of 825,596 active posts tagged with one of the 25 tags above. So, 96,315 / 825,596 is .117 or 11.7%.

The two images below show how popular these technologies have been since 2014:
Y-Axis is the Number of Posts

Most Popular Technologies: 1 – 13

Most Popular Technologies: 14 – 25

Update 1: July 12, 2016

Sudesh pointed out that there is a general downward trend until Q1, 2014. This seems to be a reflection of activity on StackOverflow rather than of a general interest in the technologies relative to each other. This query showing the total number of active posts on Stack Overflow per quarter supports this. Here are the results:

Notice the drop until 2014, Q2 and then the rise from there.

It’s perhaps more useful to view the popularity of the technologies compared to all activity on Stack Overflow. The following charts show that.

Most Popular Technologies (Relative): 1 – 13

Most Popular Technologies (Relative): 14 – 25

END UPDATE 1. Thanks, Sudesh!

The query I used to get the original data is available on StackExchange.