We are constantly being led to believe that enterprise technology is changing rapidly; that if you don’t jump on this or that hype bandwagon, at the moment They are being left behind. A decade ago, it was cloud computing. Today, it’s generative AI. Both promised to change everything. Yet, despite AWS generating $100 billion in revenue and the cloud permeating enterprise IT, the majority of enterprise IT spending today (about 90%) continues to be done on-premises. Generative AI, for its part, offers substance amid all the hype, but it is also a relative outlier in the overall enterprise IT portfolio.
The next time you panic and worry that your company is falling behind, consider how quickly companies’ preferences for programming languages and databases are changing.
The persistence of Java
Just over a decade ago, developers created a variety of new languages. Go, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, F#, Dart, and more. Fast forward to 2024, and it’s still Java, Python, JavaScript, and C# at the top of the popularity charts, whether at RedMonk or IEEE. When a language breaks through and becomes permanent and successful, like TypeScript, it’s more of an anomaly than the rule. As RedMonk’s Steve O’Grady notes of relatively static language rankings, “There was no movement among the top five languages, and less than a third of the top 20 languages moved at all,” suggesting “an environment that resists change.”
