Largest Survey Ever Reveals World's Favorite Programming Language

[CrAKeN]

The Stack Overflow yearly developer survey has become a tradition in the industry, and the place to get your bearings of popular or upcoming trends. This year, over 64,000 developers answered the survey, making this the largest such study.

 

Allowing users to vote on all the technologies they use, not just one, the survey gathered data on what is truly today's most popular programming language among developers.

 

As it was expected, JavaScript retained the top position of most popular programming language. There's no surprise here, as JavaScript can be used to create both client-side and server-side applications, along wth mobile and desktop apps. A truly versatile language, JavaScript is expected to dominate this ranking, just as Java and PHP did in the early 2000s.

 

 

Developers don't write their code from scratch every time, and always use frameworks and libraries. According to respondents, these are the most popular frameworks and libraries across all programming languages.

 

 

In the database category, classic relational databases rule the NoSQL newcomers, but many argue this won't last for long as the two continue to borrow features from each other, mixing the two technologies together.

 

 

The next chart shows the OS platform developers use to write their code (not necessarily love). While other surveys have ranked Macs and Linux desktops as #1, the Stack Overflow survey begs to differ.

 

 

Stack Overflow has also asked developers to select the programming languages they love, but not necessarily use.

 

 

Similarly, they asked developers what languages they dreaded.

 

 

...and what were the programming languages they wanted to learn.

 

 

If you're planning on learning how to code, the below chart shows the languages that pay the most. At the bottom of this chart, not included in the image, is C, VB.NET, and SQL.

 

 

The survey also tackled gender inequality in the web development world. The results are conclusive with similar studies which showed that there are very few women in tech.

 

 

Per industry vertical, software building seems to be the sector where most developers work in, followed by web and Internet services.

 

 

Other survey conclusions for which we're not going to embed an image are as follows:

 

• Most developers have studied computer science related topics, showing little breakthrough from amateur programmers.
• Most developers have a Bachelor’s or Master's degree.
• Most developers don't or work very few times from home, with most working from their company's headquarters.
• DevOps specialist is the job title that pays the most, followed by Machine learning specialist.
• Most developers find jobs by word of mouth or through friends and family members.
• Most developers are Caucasians.
• A fifth of respondents were from the US.
• Most developers are very satisfied with their jobs.
• [Frameworks/Libraries] Developers love React.js, they dread using Apache Cordova, and they want to learn Node.js.
• [Databases] Developers love Redis, they dread using Oracle DB, and they want to learn to use MongoDB.
• [Platforms] Most developers love using Linux desktops, they dread using SharePoint, and want to learn to work with the Android platform.

For this article, we selected only some of the survey's results. The full Stack Overflow survey results are here

 

Source.