There are several perennial “religion-type” issues in the tech world that make programmers pay attention: the programming language wars and the framework wars.

And the topic of programming language, is the classic in the classic, monthly, annual TIOBE programming language rankings once released, always accompanied by the language supporters of the bloody rain and training institutions in the corner of the ghost smile.

Most of the time these arguments are worthless, but the resulting traffic is huge. After all, Linus is the one who says “C++” is a terrible language.

Devjobsscanner has revealed which programming languages will be the most lucrative in 2022, based on a survey of 4 million developers around the world, and the results are surprising.

The most profitable programming language is blockchain

The number one programming language on this list is Solidity, which most people probably haven’t even heard of. The Wikipedia presentation on Solidity goes like this:

Solidity is a contract-oriented language used on a variety of different blockchain platforms. Its main developers are Gavin Wood, Christian Reitwiessner, Alex Beregszaszi, Liana Husikyan, Yoichi Hirai and several other early core Ethereum contributors. Solidity enables developers to write smart contracts on blockchains such as Ethereum.

The syntax concept of Solidity was only introduced in 2014 and is now the main programming language in Ethereum and other Competing platforms, colloquially speaking as the de facto standard in The Ethereum space in the same way that Kubernetes is for containers.

The number two programming language is Rust, which comes as no surprise to me. Looking back over the years, Rust’s highlights have been almost endless:

  • In 2019, Meta (Facebook) launched Libra, a cryptocurrency written by Rust;
  • In 2019, Microsoft considered rewriting Windows using Rust instead of C/C++;
  • In 2020, Mozilla laid off members of the Rust development team, which caused widespread concern in the community.
  • In 2021, the Rust Foundation was established.
  • Rust will become the second official Linux kernel language in 2021;
  • …

In the article “22 Trends forecast and Interpretation of software Development in 2022”, I personally expressed my optimism about Rust language. In foreign countries, Rust has basically been endorsed by various technology giants, while in China, Rust has also had experimental projects or practices in various large factories. Rust may not be on a par with established languages from an ecological point of view, but in terms of momentum, the truth about youth still holds true.

Seeing this, some people may wonder why the top two most profitable programming languages are blockchain-related, and the old programming language Java is not even in the top ten, which is inconsistent with China’s national conditions.

Indeed, the 4 million samples are based on more data from Europe and the US than from Chinese developers. However, there is no logical problem that programming languages in the blockchain industry pay higher salaries in terms of the industry fields each language is applicable to. After all, the more popular the language, the brighter the job prospects, the more sample size on average. To take an extreme example, last year’s pandemic saw older developers who taught the ancient language COBOL enjoy a second life in their careers, with higher demand and lower supply leading to higher wages.

Decentralization, SWIFT system, Web 3

The most popular event in the world these two days is the war between Russia and Ukraine. The latest news today is that the United States and the European Union have removed some Russian banks from the SWIFT international settlement system.

The word SWIFT, in fact, is not unfamiliar to the technical circle, and many programmers’ first reaction must be:

Swift: I know, it’s a programming language made by Apple for macOS, iOS.

Or:

Swift: I know, the singer with the legs and a lot of ex-boyfriends.

The SWIFT international settlement system we are talking about is called Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications in English, which is translated into Chinese as “Association for Worldwide Banking and Financial Telecommunications”. It is a non-profit organization based in Brussels, Belgium, which provides information transfer services between financial institutions worldwide and has become the main mechanism (another de facto standard) for providing financial services to international trade. In 2020, about 38 million messages were exchanged daily via the SWIFT platform, facilitating trillions of dollars worth of transactions, according to the data.

Although a neutral organization, in fact:

After 9/11, the United States required SWIFT to share data completely for the reason of monitoring the cross-border flow of illegal funds. However, SWIFT was connected with THE US dollar settlement system CHIPS, and SWIFT’s settlement and payment were based on US dollars. Thanks to the advantage of US dollar, the United States in fact completely controlled SWIFT. Citing the – www.zhihu.com/question/51…

In the past decades, kicking out of the SWIFT system was actually a very serious sanction. The previous sovereign country kicked out of the SWIFT system was Iran, which was kicked out of the SWIFT system twice in 2012 and 2018, which also caused the experience of Ms. Meng Wanzhou. During the Hong Kong crisis, there was talk of excluding Hong Kong from the SWIFT system, but it was never implemented.

To put it simply, kicking a country/region’s banking system out of the SWIFT system actually cuts off its cross-border payment channels in international trade, and the impact is the highest level under the current economic sanctions. But the sanctions are not comprehensive, at least not for Russia’s energy sector, which is another interesting point, because some countries still depend on Russian gas for winter.

There are many writers who are better at financial issues than I am, so I’d like to talk about the future of the SWIFT system in combination with the most “money” programming language mentioned above.

Politics is the continuation of economy, and the pillar of American military hegemony originates from the DOLLAR standard established by Bretton Woods system after World War II, thus forming a dollar hegemony system. To break the hegemony system of the us dollar means to break through the blockade of American hegemony.

In April 2021, Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, said publicly that the United States should limit Bitcoin because it was a financial weapon of China to weaken the dollar.

The biggest difference between the settlement of bitcoin and blockchain is that the settlement of bitcoin and blockchain is not through banks, but through a decentralized network of miners, which is actually a weakening of the SWIFT system. Circumventing SWIFT system to establish their own system is a positive strategy, and developing digital currency technology directly without bank settlement is also a positive strategy. China is taking both paths.

More than 30 countries around the world are studying digital currencies, and China has taken the lead in launching a central bank digital currency. In October 2020, the Russian Central Bank also released a report analyzing the feasibility of issuing digital rubles, which is also a possible innovation point in the future trade settlement between China and Russia.

Decentralization, which is a major technical feature of breaking away from the binding of manufacturers and power control.

On the other hand, The metasomes’ other popular concept, Web 3, can also contribute to this process — the vision of Web 3.0 is for value and data to move seamlessly across a decentralized platform, with decentralized ownership and control.

Web 3 is the true form of the Internet in which users live, allowing users to seamlessly move from site to site without any impact on the use of functionality. This is the “meta-universe”.

From the current implementation scenario, Web 3 seems to be deeply bound to blockchain, but the future implementation form of Web 3 does not necessarily have to be implemented in the way of blockchain. It can be blockchain, Internet of things, artificial intelligence, or even the organic integration of the three. Only in the real exploration process can we gradually clarify and break through the boundaries of Web 3.

Of course, from the perspective of the current technological implementation, there is still a long way to go, no matter it is the collapse of the HEGEMONY of the US dollar or the realization of the “meta-universe”. In terms of technological maturity, the conceptual gap is far from being overcome, and how to solve the contradiction of supervision and compliance remains a mystery. But from the development point of view, the future application of block chain technology to get deeper, and the Internet will be more and more high to the requirement of safety, it is enough to explain why Solidity, Rust language developers will get the highest reward, because of the smoke of war is not just a gun missile, also exists in the virtual world of between 0 and 1.