Stack Overflow's annual survey, taken by 65K+ developers: Rust remains most loved language at 86.1%, followed by TypeScript at 67.1%, Python dropped to third
Brandon Vigliarolo / TechRepublic :
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'most loved' crown has been Rust's for years — it scored 73.1% back in the 2017 survey of 64K developers and held it through 2018 and 2019. What changes this year is who sits behind it: Python, which the 2019 edition named the fastest-growing major language, slips to third, while TypeScript takes second at 67.1%.
The gap matters because love and usage are different ledgers. This is a sentiment ranking among 65K+ respondents, but it foreshadows the usage shift GitHub later reported when TypeScript passed Python and JavaScript to become its most-used language.
First-order effects
- Python loses its momentum narrative: after being flagged as the fastest-growing major language in 2019, a third-place finish in loved-languages sentiment hands ammunition to teams weighing alternatives for new projects.
- TypeScript's rise to second confirms typed JavaScript has crossed from convenience into mainstream preference, putting direct pressure on plain-JavaScript-first tooling and hiring plans.
Second-order effects
- Employers and framework maintainers reading this survey have a signal to prioritize TypeScript support, since the developer base increasingly prefers it — reinforcing the trajectory that later showed up in GitHub's usage data.
- Rust's durable love lead continues to pull systems-programming mindshare even where deployment stays rare, keeping pressure on C/C++-adjacent toolchains without yet moving mass usage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sentiment surveys act as leading indicators for usage: affection for type-safe languages precedes adoption, as seen when GitHub's developer base later made TypeScript its most-used language — a structural shift toward static typing across web and systems work alike.
- The divergence between love rankings (Rust dominant) and popularity rankings (JavaScript/Python on top) points to a two-tier language economy: small, devoted communities setting the technical agenda while large ecosystems carry production load — a gap Redmonk-style blended rankings exist precisely to reconcile.
The trend: Developer preference is migrating toward type-safe languages, with TypeScript converting survey sentiment into real usage share and Rust sustaining a loyalty moat that outpaces its deployment footprint.