Stack Overflow is a world famous and popular question and answer portal for developers and IT professionals, and its annual survey is the largest and most comprehensive among people who write code around the world. Every year, Stack Overflow conducts a survey covering everything from developers' favorite technologies to their work preferences. This year marks the ninth consecutive year of the survey, with more than 90 people taking part.
Key results:
- Python is the fastest growing programming language. This year it has risen again in the rankings, surpassing Java to become the second most popular language after Rust.
- More than half of the respondents wrote their first line of code before they were sixteen years old, although this result varies by country and gender.
- DevOps specialists and site reliability engineers are among the highest paid and most experienced developers who are the most satisfied with their work and least looking for new jobs.
- Among survey participants, developers from China are the most optimistic and believe that people born today will live better than their parents. Developers from Western European countries such as France and Germany are looking at the future with a grain of salt.
- When asked about what hinders their productivity, men most often point to the abundance of tasks that are not directly related to the development, while representatives of sexual minorities are unhappy with the “toxicity” of the work environment.
Not without a share of self-promotion. Stack Overflow asked respondents to remember the last time they solved a development problem with or without a portal. The results showed that Stack Overflow saves a developer 30 to 90 minutes of time per week.
Some facts
Every month, about 50 million people visit Stack Overflow to learn or share their experiences and build their careers. 21 million of these people are professional developers or university students preparing to become so. About 4% of respondents consider programming their hobby rather than their profession, and just under 2% of respondents used to be professional developers but have changed their occupation.
About 50% of respondents identified themselves as full-stack developers, i.e. specialists who write both client and server code, usually related to web technologies, and about 17% consider themselves mobile application developers. Most often, front-end developers also write back-end code, and vice versa. Other popular combinations of IT professions are database administrator and system administrator, DevOps specialist and site reliability engineer (Site Reliability Engineer), designer and front-end developer, university researcher and researcher.
About 65% of professional developers among Stack Overflow users contribute to open source projects (like LibreOffice or Gimp) once a year or more. Participation in open source projects often depends on the programming language. So, developers working with Rust, WebAssembly and Elixir do it most often, while those working with VBA, C # and SQL help open projects about half as often.
Many developers program even outside of work. About 80% of respondents consider programming their hobby. Other responsibilities outside of development correlate significantly with this statement. For example, programmers who have children are less likely to list development as a hobby. Female respondents are also less likely to consider programming their hobby.
In the United States, almost 30% of respondents said they had mental health problems, a higher percentage than in other large countries such as the UK, Canada, Germany or India.
This year, respondents were asked which social networks they use most often. Reddit and YouTube were the most common responses. At the same time, the preferences of IT professionals do not correspond to the general data on the popularity of social networks, where Facebook takes the first place, and Reddit is not even in the Top 10 (Reddit has about 330 million active users, compared to 2,32 billion monthly Facebook users).
For the seventh year in a row, JavaScript has become the most popular programming language, and Python has risen again in the rankings. Python has overtaken Java in the overall rankings this year, just as it outperformed C# last year and PHP a year earlier. Thus, today Python is the fastest growing programming language.
The most beloved, "terrible" and "desired" programming languages
For the fourth year in a row, Rust has become the most loved programming language in the community, followed by Python. As Python's popularity skyrockets, being on this list means that not only are there more and more Python developers, but they also want to keep working with the language.
VBA and Objective-C are recognized as the most "scary" languages this year. This means that a large percentage of developers who currently use these languages have no interest in continuing to do so.
Python is the most "desired" language for the third year in a row, which means developers who aren't using it yet are indicating they would like to learn it. In second and third place are JavaScript and Go, respectively.
What about blockchain?
The majority of respondents in the Stack Overflow survey answered that their organizations do not use blockchain technology and the most common use cases are non-cryptocurrency. Most often, blockchain is used by developers from India.
When asked what they think of blockchain technology, developers are generally optimistic about its usefulness. However, this optimism is mainly concentrated among young and less experienced professionals. The more experienced the respondent, the more likely they are to say that blockchain technology is “irresponsible use of resources.”
The highest paying programming languages
Among the developers surveyed, those who use Clojure, F#, Elixir, and Rust earn the highest salaries among US-based programmers, averaging around $70. However, there are regional differences. Scala developers in the US are among the highest paid while Clojure and Rust developers earn the most in India.
You can see more interesting data and figures in the original report in English.
Source: 3dnews.ru