The 2025 developer surveys from JetBrains (24,534 respondents across 194 countries) and Stack Overflow (49,000+ respondents from 177 countries) reveal a generational shift: TypeScript, Rust, and Go top the growth charts while JavaScript—still the most-used language at 66%—has hit a maturity plateau. Python interrupted JavaScript’s 10-year dominance on GitHub Octoverse 2024, surging 7 percentage points year-over-year. The languages developers WANT to learn (Rust 10%, Go 11%, TypeScript 6%) now diverge sharply from what they actually use in production.
This isn’t just survey data. It’s a strategic inflection point. Developers are stuck maintaining JavaScript codebases while their growth investments shift elsewhere. Companies hiring for JavaScript find candidates who’d rather learn Rust. The gap between usage and desire reveals fundamental tension: mature languages remain essential but no longer excite.
TypeScript, Rust, and Go Lead the Promise Index
JetBrains’ Promise Index—combining growth stability, adoption momentum, and user loyalty—ranks TypeScript #1, followed by Rust and Go as the three most promising languages for 2025 expansion. TypeScript saw “among the most dramatic rises in real-world usage over the last five years,” according to the JetBrains Research Blog. Rust maintains its position as the most admired language for the seventh consecutive year (72% in Stack Overflow 2025), while Go reached TIOBE Index #7 in April 2025—its highest position ever.
The numbers behind the growth are substantial. Go’s professional developer base doubled in five years, from 2.2 million to over 5 million when including secondary usage. Rust’s Cargo package manager earned 71% admiration in the Stack Overflow survey, making it the most admired development tool. Meanwhile, 11% of developers plan to adopt Go in the next 12 months, 10% want Rust, and 6% are targeting TypeScript. Compare that to JavaScript’s 66% usage rate with flat growth, and the desire-vs-reality gap becomes obvious.
This divergence creates real tension for developers and companies. Junior developers learn TypeScript and Rust first but companies need JavaScript maintainers. Hiring managers face candidates who want growth languages while codebases require mature language expertise. JavaScript hasn’t failed—it’s succeeded so completely it became table stakes, like COBOL. Critical but unsexy.
JavaScript Hits Maturity Plateau as Python Surges
JavaScript remains ubiquitous at 66% usage, but growth has flatlined. Python ended JavaScript’s 10-year reign as GitHub’s #1 language in 2024, posting a 7-point surge—its largest single-year jump in over a decade. JetBrains data confirms: “JavaScript, PHP, and SQL appear to have reached their maturity plateau,” while PHP, Ruby, and Objective-C enter “long-term decline.”
The Hacker News community reflects this shift. A December 2025 discussion on JavaScript’s future concluded, “The proper answer is a lot less JavaScript… WebAssembly is the brighter future.” Another thread on TypeScript 7 progress noted TypeScript “has operated at a huge advantage of being the only viable solution to a problem that every web developer has needed.” Developers aren’t abandoning JavaScript—they’re absorbing it into TypeScript, which offers type safety without abandoning the npm ecosystem.
Plateau doesn’t mean death. It means commoditization. JavaScript achieved universal adoption (66%) but lost growth momentum to languages solving problems it can’t easily retrofit: type safety (TypeScript), memory safety (Rust), and simplicity at scale (Go). Existing JavaScript codebases will exist for decades, ensuring continued relevance. However, new developers won’t celebrate it. They’ll learn TypeScript first, JavaScript second.
Why TypeScript, Rust, and Go Are Winning
TypeScript dominates because it offers the pragmatic middle ground: type safety without abandoning JavaScript. Companies migrate 10,000+ line codebases incrementally—averaging 1,000 lines per week for experienced teams—while maintaining existing functionality. TypeScript compiles to JavaScript with zero runtime overhead, and the gradual migration path de-risks adoption. Major adopters include Microsoft (VSCode, Azure SDK), Google (Angular), Airbnb, Slack, and Spotify. TypeScript 7, expected in early 2026, promises 10x faster builds via a native port. Unlike Rust’s steep learning curve, TypeScript delivers immediate value with minimal disruption.
Rust represents the opposite end: maximum correctness, maximum investment. It’s the most admired language (72%) for the seventh year but faces an adoption paradox. In the 2024 State of Rust survey, 45.5% worried about insufficient industry adoption—up from 42.5% in 2023—while 45.2% cited complexity as a barrier. That’s not momentum, that’s anxiety. Development velocity drops 30-50% during the first 3-6 months as senior developers debug lifetime annotations instead of implementing features. However, production wins are real: Discord replaced Go services with Rust and saw dramatic performance improvements, while Dropbox reduced memory usage by 75%. Rust succeeds when performance requirements clearly justify 6-12 month ramp-up: financial trading systems, game engines, long-running services where memory leaks are unacceptable.
Go won the cloud-native war through deliberate simplicity. Fast compilation (seconds vs minutes for Rust), built-in concurrency (goroutines, channels), and single binary deployment make Go ideal for DevOps tooling and microservices. Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform are all written in Go—solidifying its cloud-native positioning. Companies like Google, DataDog, Dropbox, HashiCorp, Apple, and Salesforce run Go in production, with 40%+ of Go-heavy organizations operating in the technology sector. Go reached #4 in JetBrains Promise Index and was the third fastest-growing language on GitHub 2024 (after Python and TypeScript). According to JetBrains Go ecosystem analysis, Go optimizes for team scalability—codebases remain readable as teams grow.
What Programming Language Trends Mean for Developers
The desire-vs-usage gap isn’t a survey artifact. It’s the generational shift in action. Developers invest personal time learning Rust, Go, and TypeScript while spending work hours maintaining JavaScript. Career trajectories now require dual strategies: maintain mature languages for current employment, learn growth languages for future opportunities. Tech leads face hiring mismatches: candidates prioritize growth languages, but legacy codebases need expertise in stable technologies.
For companies, tech stack decisions carry strategic weight. TypeScript offers the lowest-risk migration: gradual adoption, zero runtime overhead, and immediate ROI from catching type errors at build time. Rust demands 6-12 month investment but delivers memory safety guarantees that eliminate entire bug classes—justified for performance-critical systems and security-sensitive applications. Go makes sense for cloud-native infrastructure and microservices where simplicity at scale trumps advanced features. The question isn’t which language is “best”—it’s which aligns with team capabilities and business requirements.
Languages will increasingly split into two categories: legacy/maintenance (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby) and growth (TypeScript, Rust, Go, Python). Legacy languages remain ubiquitous for existing codebases, ensuring decades of relevance, but they won’t drive innovation or attract new developers. Growth languages will dominate greenfield projects and attract mindshare. JavaScript won’t die—it’ll become the new COBOL, critical infrastructure that nobody celebrates.
Key Takeaways
- TypeScript, Rust, and Go top the 2025 Promise Index with highest growth potential while JavaScript plateaus at 66% usage despite remaining most-used
- Python ended JavaScript’s 10-year GitHub dominance with a 7-point surge, its largest single-year jump in over a decade
- The desire-vs-usage gap is real: 11% want Go, 10% want Rust, 6% want TypeScript, but production codebases are predominantly JavaScript
- TypeScript wins with gradual migration and zero runtime overhead; Rust offers memory safety with 30-50% velocity drop for 3-6 months; Go dominates cloud-native through simplicity
- Mature languages (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby) are becoming table stakes—critical but unsexy—while growth languages (TypeScript, Rust, Go) attract mindshare and greenfield projects
