“Can you speak another language?”

If you posed this question to someone only a few years ago, you might get “French” or “Spanish” or “Mandarin Chinese” as a response. Today, there’s an entire universe of languages opening up that are in high demand. The catch is, you don’t speak these new dialects. You code them.

People who can code can effectively speak another language. And their skills are in high demand. There are thousands of programming languages that have come into existence in the last 25+ years, and while not all have proved particularly useful or effective, there are a handful that remain in high demand.

All the software you use and enjot on your phones, tables and computers were written in these new languages. And someone has to write them. Why not you?

Here are 3 of the most in-demand software languages today, and why you should learn to code them before someone else does.

  1. Java

    Java got its start in 1991 as a programming language for televisions. Lead designer James Gosling, who lead the on the now famous “Green Team” at Sun Microsystems who developed the language, used the young language to develop a handheld home-entertainment controller that was intended to be used in the digital cable television industry.

    While their concept and ensuing product was impressive, it was ahead of its time. Java was, however, unintentionally the perfect fit for the burgeoning idea of the “Internet”. In 1995 it was announced that one of the first Internet browsers, Netscape Navigator, would incorporate the language.

    Today, Java is used heavily in the financial services industry and the majority of Android application development is done through the popular language.

  2. PHP

    Used heavily in the development of websites, PHP is an open source general-purpose scripting language. Some of the largest and “heaviest” websites on the Internet like Yahoo! and Facebook use the language to run their websites. One of the main benefits of PHP is that it can be directly embedded into HTML, another quite popular website coding language.

  3. Perl

    One of the strangest programming languages around today, it was developed originally in the late 1980’s by a NASA engineer who was having trouble extracting and processing reports. It’s one of the most pliant coding language and has even been described as the “duct-tape” of coding languages.