The increase in cyber attacks, especially ransomware, is making grow interest in cybersecurity among developers. Meanwhile, interest in the Internet of Things and game development has sparked more interest in a programming language that is quite a few years old: C++. This has been confirmed by 2021 O’Really Media Learning Platform Annual Review.
Created by O’Reilly, a provider of educational content focused on developers, its analysis focuses on reviewing the search terms used in it, as well as the content modules (online training courses, books, videos or videoconferences) accessed by developers who use it to improve their knowledge. In this way, it manages to identify the trends among them, with respect to programming languages and related topics, which stand out every year.
The growth in the platform of interest in cybersecurity has risen notably due in part to attacks such as those suffered by Colonial Pipeline, Kaseya and SolarWinds. In total, the use of content related to the topic has risen 270% year-on-year. Privacy content improved by 90%, identity content by 50% and application security by 45%.
Despite the increased interest in C++, Python and Java still dominate the use of O’Reilly’s platform, which has also seen rapid growth in the use of Rust and Go content. Both are popular with systems development and infrastructure programming. Rust, in particular, is being used instead of C++ to help avoid memory-related security issues. It is used by Microsoft, AWS, and Google, and is considered the second official language of the Linux kernel.
The consumption of content on Go has risen 23% year-on-year, and that of Rust has done so by 31%. Python continues to be the one with the most consumed content, although this consumption has decreased slightly in 2021 compared to 2020, which may be due to the fact that its knowledge is increasingly broad, especially in fields related to working with data, where developers are expected to know Python, in addition to other programming languages.
Other areas in which developers have shown interest are software architecture, with a 19% growth in content consumption. Kubernetes container management software has grown by 15% and 13% microservices. Additionally, overall interest in container software content has improved by 137%.
Developers and tech professionals alike are showing more interest among AWS’s rivals, as consumption of AWS-related content Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have grown by 32% and 54% respectively, while the consumption of AWS content has decreased by 3%.
The consumption of content on machine learning on the platform has risen by 35%, but unevenly in terms of that received by its specialties: interest in deep learning has fallen by 14%, while interest in neural networks has grown by 13%. In addition, the reinforced learning and antagonistic networks have improved by 37% and 51% respectively.
