The Ultimate Coding Language Battle: Who Will Come Out On Top?
Once you’ve learned a coding language well enough, learning the others is more like learning a different dialect of a spoken language rather than learning Chinese if you’ve never learned a language other than English before, à la Mark Zukergerg.
However, tech bootcamps are accelerated, and are therefore most likely going to teach you one language very well very quickly, rather than going through the whole history of coding. Based on a study by Course Report, we have created a visual of the top coding languages taught by tech bootcamps across the country. Feel free to share it with your friends, we like sharing.
So who is right? Which coding language is best?
It doesn’t take a data scientist to see that Ruby is by far the most-taught programming language, taking the cake by being taught in 57% of courses.
But just because Ruby dominates doesn’t mean it goes undisputed.
One of the bootcamps that taught Ruby on Rails semi-religiously to aspiring full-stack developers is MakerSquare, which is an immersion school located in San Francisco and Austin. But since they began in 2013, they have introduced more and more JavaScript into their curriculum, leading up to a recent announcement that their next cohort beginning February 24th will teach entirely JavaScript. Harsh Patel of MakerSquare discussed the shift with Course Report this week, stating that it “doesn’t feel like a crazy or gigantic change”.
The frameworks they will be working with are Angular, React, and Node, but Patel wants students to get a strong fundamental understanding of Javascript in order to be able to work with any framework they stumble upon in the future.
When asked about how the decision to switch to teaching JavaScript came about, Patel said, “Instructors and founders all started seeing that Node was being used more and more by larger enterprise companies and that’s usually when you know that a language/framework is here to stay.”
The whole point of tech bootcamps is to be helpful catalysts to getting a job in web development, so these accelerated learning programs want to make sure they’re staying on top of languages that are the most relevant to companies.
Another reason MakerSquare is making the switch is becuase they wanted to eliminate constant “context switching,” or going back and forth between different states of mind. Thus far, they have been teching Ruby and JavaScript, which can make it more difficult to focus on one language or task.
Let’s throw another language into the mix.
Coder Camps wrote an article explaining why you should choose to study with them and learn .NET rather than attend another tech bootcamp and learn, well, anything else. The article explains that Coder Camps is the only .NET bootcamp in the SF Bay Area and claims that the demand for .NET programmers is staggering – while there is an overflow of entry-level programmers in other languages due to the oversaturation of programming bootcamps in the Bay Area, there remains a scarcity of entry-level programmers who know .NET.
This chart taken from the Coder Camps blog argues the importance of learning .NET, which was developed my Microsoft and runs primarily on Microsoft Windows, which dominates the operating system market share on a global scale.
Coder Camps Founder David Graham responded to this question on Quora: Is there a coding bootcamp bubble? Part of his answer included an explaination that positions for developers weren’t going to dry up anytime soon, and bootcamps just want to prepare as many people as possible in the most effective way possible. Part of this includes teaching programming languages that are the most useful.
“The .NET world of employment is global, while most jobs for Ruby (currently) are localized to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.”
This visual generated by Indeed and found on the Coder Camps blog shows the progression of jobs in various programming languages over time.
According to Liliana Monge, co-founder of Sabio, a software development bootcamp based in LA that focuses on getting more women and minorities in tech, “.Net is used by tons of great enterprise companies, so when our folks graduate they can secure jobs with great national companies that will offer them an opportunity to learn a ton and be part of a great established organization.”
However, Hack Reactor, affectionately known as the “Harvard of tech bootcamps”, distinguishes and prides itself by teaching Javascript. However, this may not be a distinguishing factor for long as more bootcamps begin to teach Jacascript.
The debate about why Hack Reactor chooses to focus their curriculum on Javascript is in full throttle on Quora. Quora is a great place where you can get dangerously lost in questions, answers, and different opinions on various topics within the realm of tech bootcamps.
In a Quora question seeking out more options for full-stack Javascript development bootcamps, Adam Lovallo, co-founder of Course Report said, “There is definitely a lot of interest in the success of these full stack JS programs and I suspect more bootcamps will begin offering JS centric courses in addition to rails. ”
This prediction might prove to be true over time as more tech bootcamps emerge or change to focus on teaching Javascript.
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Why is this important? If you were an employer, wouldn’t you want to hire a programmer who already knew the programming language you needed? Part of chosing the school that is right for you might be picking the one that offers classes in your desired langauge, based on where you would like to work in the future.
Tech bootcamps graduated 6,000 people in 2014. That’s 3X as many as the year before. Basically you better get on this train now, cause it’s not slowing down, and it would be helpful if you got on the right car now, so you end up at the right point on the software development station.
Ok, train analogy over.
But in all honesty, have any of you attended a tech bootcamp, or thought of attending one, and considered programming langauges taught to be a top priority? If you’re a school out there, why do you chose to teach the langauge that you do? Please comment or send over your thoughts ([email protected]).
(You could end up in the LendLayer blog and get, you know, super famous.)
