O’Reilly Media has just published its annual report which takes stock of the most sought-after technological subjects, and those which are in decline. For this, it is based on the uses of the 2.8 million users of its online learning platform. Unsurprisingly, topics around AI are attracting growing interest among developers. We take stock!
Artificial intelligence: a marked interest in NLP
Natural language processing (NLP) is driving the most interest, seeing the strongest year-over-year growth among AI topics (+42%), followed by deep learning (+23%) ). Developers are also looking for more and more information related to transformers (the famous T found in the GPT-3 model). These search trends are directly linked to the rise of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational service launched just a few months ago, and other AI technologies that are following suit and are now popping up all over the web. On the other hand, less enthusiasm now for the following subjects: cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Java 11.
Widespread interest in GPT-3 and its successor ChatGPT has created a huge surge of interest around NLP and deep learning, which will only increase as the potential of these offerings grows and more new projects will appear, analyzes Mike Loukides, vice president of content for emerging technologies at O’Reilly.
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Languages: Go and Rust growing
The report confirms that Python and Java continue to be the most used languages with respective growth of 3.4% and 1.7% but that a notable interest in Go and Rust is to be highlighted: +20% and +22 % (figures from the O’Reilley Media platform). Go is also entering the top 10 of TIOBE’s ranking this month, which lists the most popular languages.
If this growth continues, these popular infrastructure-related languages may soon directly challenge Java and Python.
On the data side, among data-related topics, many users leaned towards the business intelligence tool: Microsoft Power BI (+31% year-over-year growth).
Power BI has clearly established itself as the leading business analytics platform. Apache Spark remains the most widely used data tool, while the Hadoop data platform is relegated to “legacy status”.
Soft skills: priority to project management
More than ever, developers want to strengthen their technical skills: +35% growth in interest for good programming practices (coding practices) and +24% for quantum computing (quantum computing). But business experts do not only want to develop their hard skills, they are now also interested in soft skills which are highly appreciated by recruiters…
The 3 soft skills most sought after by developers:
Project management (+47%)
Professional development (+37%)
Communication (+36%)
The other big takeaway is developers’ interest in improving their soft skills, which suggests that more and more tech leaders will be given business leadership roles as technology becomes more popular. will infiltrate the entire organization, says Mike Loukides.
