Coding skills are now a requirement for lots of geospatial practitioners, here’s a recent and useful summary named GIS Programming: Languages breakdown.

From the article: “Unlike Fortran, C/C++ is still in widespread use, in the GIS-field it’s beeing used for several desptop applications of some age, as well as in what I’ll call the “first wave” of open source libraries and utilities. Notable mentions are PostGIS, OGR/GDAL, PROJ.4 and Mapserver. […] Java libraries was the “second wave” of open source GIS, and brought us libraries and tools like GeoServer, GeoTools, JTS and GeoWebCache. Just because of GeoServer I think you should know some Java to get along as a GIS-developer. […] Python has beed adopted by ESRI as the scripting language of choice for their ArcGIS-platform, as well as by QGIS, where you have access to a python REPL and can write plugins using Python. […] Python is a really great programming language in itself, easy to grasp, enforces clean, readable code, and with the usage both in ESRI and QGIS it’s a language that you most definably should know it you work with GIS. […] From the advent of Google Maps and OpenLayers, JavaScript found it’s place in the GIS-domain as the language to write web map clients in (that is, after people realized that Flash and Sliverlight where blind alleys). Now there is a large ecosystem of browser-libraries, such as OpenLayers 2 & 3, Leaflet, mapbox-gl-js, proj4js and several more.”