Growth in popularity of Go and Scala has made them the highest-paying programming languages in the United States, according to Stack Overflow’s 2017 developer survey.
The results of the survey of 64,000 respondents, showed that Stack Overflow’s record of trending programming languages aligned with demand and salary for developers with these skills.
The growth of these languages, which can both net an average yearly salary of $110,000, can be attributed to fields like DevOps and Big Data, according to Stack Overflow’s director of developer insights, Kevin Troy.
“Go’s enthusiasts call it ‘the language of the cloud,’” said Troy. “It’s been adopted for a lot of network infrastructure and other systems where scaling across multiple machines is an important consideration.”
The focus of many job listings asking for Go by name are often for developers to build a stable backbone to support the work of other developers, Troy says.
Scala on the other hand is more suited towards number crunching. It’s used notably by Twitter as the primary language for backend development of web applications.
Since it runs on the Java Virtual Machine, it plays well with backends written in Java or other JVM languages, according to Troy. “And since it’s a functional programming language, it’s well-suited to data processing, machine learning, and similar tasks. So it’s not uncommon to see job listings for ‘big data’ jobs call for Scala.”
