JavaScript and Java both rank among developers’ most favorite and least favorite programming languages in JetBrains’ State of Developer Ecosystem 2022 report. The just-released report is based on a survey of more than 29,000 developers.

The most favorite languages cited in the report, relative to the number of programmers using them, were Kotlin, C#, Python, Rust, and Java. In terms of total mentions by participants, the most favorite languages were Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, and Kotlin.

The five languages most often mentioned as a least favorite were JavaScript, Java, PHP, C, and C++. When calculating unpopularity relative to the number of people using it, the “absolute champion” (disliked by 96% of its users!) was Perl, followed by Visual Basic, Delphi, C, and PHP.

The most commonly used programming language was JavaScript, which was used by 65% of respondents in the previous 12 months. TypeScript, Microsoft’s strongly typed JavaScript, was found to be the fastest growing. TypeScript was used by 34% of respondents, up from 12% in 2017. 92% of the TypeScript users also used JavaScript. Indeed, 75% of the coding community was involved in web development.

Published this week, the sixth annual report was based on responses from a survey of 29,269 developers from the around world, conducted May to July 2022. Other findings in the State of Developer Ecosystem 2022 report:

• One out of every two developers was planning to adopt a new language. The top choices were Go, Rust, Kotlin, TypeScript, and Python.
• Artificial intelligence/machine learning was the most promising technology among those surveyed, and Rust was the most promising programming.
• Python, which was the second most popular programming language, continued to strengthen its position, outperforming Java as the primary language in use by respondents and closing the gap with JavaScript.
• The operating systems most popular for deployment of development environments unsurprisingly were Wndows, macOS, and Linux.