JavaScript, GitHub and AWS are the winners of a large survey of 32,000 developers • The Register

A survey of nearly 32,000 developers confirmed the dominance of JavaScript, showing a remarkable 91% using GitHub and growing use of AWS despite the best efforts of Microsoft and Google.

The survey was huge, with sections on 13 different programming languages, big data, databases, DevOps, developer demographics, microservices, collaboration tools, testing, and more.

JavaScript tops the language popularity charts, with 69% use, or 39% when developers were asked to specify their “primary programming language.”

It’s the same as last year, but maybe it should be combined with TypeScript, which went from 12% to 13%. Perhaps more remarkable is that Java is up from 37 to 32 percent, while PHP is up from 15 to 22 percent.

All is not what seems. The State of the Developer Ecosystem survey is annual, but the 2021 effort was the largest to date, down from just under 20,000 respondents last year.

Why the difference? JetBrains told us that the 2021 survey is global, whereas it previously targeted “18 countries, which contain 70% of the world’s developers.” JetBrains noted that these additional developers tended to use more PHP and less Java. Nonetheless, this means that the company no longer claims that Java is the most widely used primary programming language in the world and has conceded that title to JavaScript.

Language losers? No big surprises. Scala went from 5% to 3% “used in last 12 months”. Visual Basic has gone from 5 to 4 percent. Objective-C went from 4 to 3 percent. And even Swift, once the shining star of new languages, is down 9-7% (although large regions may be a factor).

There were notable regional differences. Java was most popular in China and South Korea. The UK was above average for the use of JavaScript, PHP and Python, the US for JavaScript and Python and India for JavaScript, Python and C ++, for example.

This is a large survey, and we looked at the points of interest; if you’re interested in the details, the full results can be found here.

The biggest takeaways

According to the survey, desktop apps are not dead. 71% of respondents said they develop back-end web applications, 58% front-end web, 32% desktop, and 30% mobile. This puts desktop development ahead of mobile, perhaps reflecting the tedious work of building custom business software.

The gender breakdown was desperately male, but the proportion of female developers decreased as the experience increased. Developers with over 16 years of experience are 97% male, while those under a year old are 88% male.

“Diversity in the tech industry is increasing among young developers,” the report said, taking an optimistic view, but it is also possible that female developers will drop out of the profession sooner.

What do developers earn? More in the United States than anywhere else, with a huge margin, according to this survey, with a median net salary of $ 102,000 compared to $ 54,000 in Canada and the United Kingdom (the second largest). 63 percent of those surveyed had full-time jobs, with most of the rest being students, self-employed or self-employed.

Another point to remember was that the developers are young. According to the survey, 48% said they were between 21 and 29 years old, the largest group. Only 14% were over 40 years old. Again, there are big regional differences, Anastassiya Sichkarenko, the market research analyst who worked on the report, told us. “In the United States there are a lot of very experienced developers, but in countries like India there are a lot of young developers.

GitHub is dominant, but less in professional than personal projects. 91% of developers said they used GitHub (up from 71% last year), but only 48% used it for businesses – although it still leads second-placed GitLab at 36%.

The survey also saw a marked growth in the use of GitHub shares, from 15% last year to 45% today, although Jenkins has retained its top spot. Use of GitHub for issue tracking was also on the rise, without a direct comparison to last year due to the different distribution of data, but this year 38% of businesses and 42% of personal projects used GitHub Issues. .

Best for tracking business issues was Jira with 42%. When it comes to version control technology, Git is up 90-93 percent, Subversion 9-7 percent. Also of note: 67% of developers reported using Git (or SVN, etc.) from terminal, although 57% also use it from an IDE.

In the container world, 37% of “respondents involved in infrastructure development” use Kubernetes, down slightly from 40% last year. “It’s pretty much the same, but it probably stopped his rapid rise,” Sishkarenko said.

64% of respondents use Amazon Web Services (AWS), 25% Google Cloud, and 22% Microsoft Azure. This compares to 62, 30 and 25 percent last year. In other words, AWS has slightly increased its share of DevOps usage within this community.

Alibaba Cloud also made an appearance, at 12%, perhaps reflecting the global nature of the new survey. There was also a look at how these numbers vary depending on the size of the company.

Azure usage was higher in large enterprises, while Google Cloud was higher among individual users and small businesses. AWS peaked in the middle, among companies with 51 to 1,000 employees.

An intriguing section asked if cloud services were used in the development workflow. 64% didn’t use them at all, but of those who did, 52% said their data was stored in the cloud, and 40% said “it’s hard to replicate the application environment for local development “. This is a common problem with applications that depend on multiple services: setting up a local development environment can become complex.

The language-specific sections also generated some interesting statistics. In the C # world, 66% were doing .NET Core development, compared to 62% for the .NET Framework. Microsoft’s cross-platform .NET has taken the lead. Last year it was 75% .NET Framework and 68% .NET Core.

There is no impartial investigation, and it suffered from being conducted by a supplier, JetBrains, which led (as the report itself acknowledged) to the problem that “JetBrains users could have been on average more willing to respond to the survey. “

This bias was most evident in the question on FDI. JetBrains reports that 75 percent of Java developers use IntelliJ IDEA (a JetBrains product), which is not far from Snyk’s recent survey of 2,000 Java developers, which showed 72 percent were using IDEA.

That said, Snyk’s survey found 25% usage for Eclipse and 23% usage for VS Code, where JetBrains has 11 and 4% (again, specific to Java developers). In both surveys, developers could choose more than one. There could of course be a bias in Snyk’s (much smaller) survey as well. However, the JetBrains survey is exceptional for the number of participants and the detail of the questions – although, in order to reduce “response burden”, the survey did not show all sections to all participants.

JetBrains made an effort to get good data. The number of respondents before the data cleansing was over 47,000; these were reduced by eliminating “filled too quickly” surveys, responses from identical IP addresses and surveys with “extremely similar responses”, among other criteria, removing over 10,000 submissions.

The data was not only collected from JetBrains users; there were ads in “social media, Facebook, Instagram, third party bloggers, online communities,” the company told us. The survey has been translated into nine different languages, addressing what JetBrains said it sees as a weakness in other surveys such as the one conducted by StackOverflow, which it says is not representative of programming communities. non-English speaking and Asian.

Despite JetBrains’ leanings, Microsoft’s open source Visual Studio code made a strong impression in this survey. It was the most popular IDE for C, C ++, JavaScript, and Rust. C # developers used Visual Studio the most. Kotlin Developers, Android Studio. Swift, Xcode developers. IDE JetBrains won for Go, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby. 84 percent overall preferred a dark theme for their editor. ®