The Queen of Programming Languages with 11M+ Users

Post author By Konstantinos Korakitis
Post date December 5, 2019
No Comments on The Queen of Programming Languages with 11M+ Users

The choice of programming language matters deeply to developers because they want to keep their skills up to date and marketable. Programming Languages are a beloved subject of debate and the kernels of some of the strongest developer communities. They matter to toolmakers too, as they want to make sure they provide the most useful SDKs.

Here is an update on Programming Language Communities, from our State of the Developer Nation Report 17th Edition.

It can be hard to assess how widely used a programming language is. The indices available from players like Tiobe, Redmonk, Stack Overflow’s yearly survey, or Github’s Octoverse are great, but mostly offer only relative comparisons between languages, providing no sense of the absolute size of each community. They may also be biased geographically, or skewed towards certain fields of software development, or open source developers.

The estimates we present here look at active software developers using each programming language, across the globe and across all kinds of programmers.

They are based on two pieces of data:

First, our independent estimate of the global number of software developers, which we published for the first time in 2017. We estimate that in mid 2019 there are 18 million active software developers in the world.

Second, our large-scale, low-bias surveys which reach tens of thousands of developers every six months. In the surveys, we consistently ask developers about their use of programming languages across ten areas of development, giving us rich and reliable information about who uses each language and in which context.

JAVASCRIPT REMAINS QUEEN OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

11M+ developers use Javascript

The most popular programming language by a wide margin is Javascript, including derivatives like TypeScript and CoffeeScript. The Javascript community counts over 11 million active developers. Even in software sectors where Javascript is least popular like machine learning or on-device code in IoT, over a fifth of developers use it for their projects.

Programming language communities Q2 2019

The rise of machine learning is a clear factor in the success of Python:

8 in 10 machine learning developers use Python in their work (compared to just 25% using R, the other language often associated with data science). Java, of course, is a cornerstone of the mobile app ecosystem (Android) as well as a great general-purpose language.

Language use is not static: developers drop and adopt new languages all the time

It would appear that it is not meaningful to speak of “Java developers” or “Python developers” in any fundamental sense, other than that they use those languages at a certain point in time. While we see a net decline in the use of most languages by our repeat respondents, some languages reverse that trend and show significant growth. The first of these is Kotlin, which we are confident to say is the rising star in the programming language firmament.

Kotlin’s rank among programming languages moved from 11th to 8th place in just a year, and one in ten developers now use the language.

Rank of programming language communities 2017-2019

Tracking the ever-changing landscape of the software development ecosystem is why we run our Developer Economics surveys twice a year and there is one live right now. To track changes on programming languages, tools and platforms we need you to share with us your coding experiences! We would be very interested to know what programming languages, hardware, frameworks and platforms you use, and the types of projects you’re working on.

Has the new Oculus Quest piqued your interest and restarted the heart of VR development? Or is AR and mixed reality where it really is? Help us tell the technology leaders what you think, and by doing so become part of the change you want to see in the tools you use.

Tags developer languages, java, javascript, Kotlin, programming languages, python

Tools

The TechGig Engineering Tech Stack

Post author By Ram Awasthi
Post date November 18, 2019
No Comments on The TechGig Engineering Tech Stack

TechGig is a technology platform to Attract, Engage and Hire top tech talent. Companies can source talent from a growing community of 4 million developers and leverage the power of automated real-time assessments and data-driven decision support.

Deciding Tech Stack is the most important decision you need to take while creating any Tech Product. The important criterion we have used while deciding technology stack are developer ecosystem, agility, scalability, speed and performance. Every product has unique requirements and you need to select technology stack matching your requirements. Blindly copying others’ technology decisions is not the right way to go. With the growth of users and features sometimes, you might need to replace old tech pieces and adopt new ones. While designing your architecture you should design in such a way that replacing some part of your older stack should not lead to a major rewrite.

TechGig engineering team believes in Open Source technologies. Our complete stack is made up of open-source software. For different layers, we have used different technologies specific to the requirement.

Front End

Our Front End is served by LAMP stack and client-side is written in jQuery and AngularJS which is most commonly used stack and is appreciated by the developer community for its agility and scalability.

Full-Text Search

Full-text search is an important requirement for TechGig. For this, we are using Solr which supports real-time indexing of content, faceted search, dynamic clustering and scalability and fault tolerance.

Containerization

TechGig supports 54+ languages in its code evaluation engine. To scale it in real-time and support these many languages and environments we are heavily using containers. Docker is the container technology which provides lightweight virtualization with almost no overhead.

Data Store

A lot of data within the TechGig ecosystem is not relational in nature like metadata of various types of evaluations, events and analytics data. To support these kinds of data we are using MongoDB as NoSQL technology. MongoDB is easy to use, highly available, highly scalable and high-performance document-oriented database which fits well within our requirements for evolving data and real-time analytics.

Messaging

TechGig application follows loosely coupled architecture to manage complexity, modularity and stability of code. Messaging is an important aspect of loosely coupled architecture. TechGig uses Kafka as the message queue for inter-communication between different modules of application like code evaluation front end, code evaluation engine, content indexing, real-time analytics, recommendation engine etc.

Caching Tech Stack Requirements

Caching is an important requirement for any application to enhance performance and response time. TechGig uses Redis to support data caching and offloading database load. TechGig serves user profile data, session data, stats and a lot of long-lived data from Redis caching layer. Other static data like JavaScript, CSS and images are served from Akamai CDN.

Backend and Analytics

A lot of heavy lifting components like face detection, face recognition recommendation services, plagiarism detection, content classification, bulk mailing services etc. are written in java and python using OpenCV, NLTK and TensorFlow frameworks.

Analytics is very important for better user experience and informed decision making. TechGig uses ELK stack for data ingestion and exploration and visualization. All event logs and behavioural data is ingested and visualized using ELK stack.

Development and Deployment

Apart from the technology stack, the selection of Software development tools is also very critical. This includes IDE, build tools, source control, requirement and bug tracking, CI/CD pipeline and testing tools. TechGig team uses, VSCode as IDE as of this lightweight and very fast. For source control TechGig uses BitBucket and for the requirement and Bug tracking, Atlassian Jira is used. Bitbucket and Jira go along so well, and both are Atlassian tools. TechGig uses Jenkins for its CI/CD pipeline as it is very easy to manage, requires very little maintenance and has a rich plugin ecosystem. For automated testing we use Selenium as it is open source, supports multiple browser testing and parallel test executions.

Site Reliability

After all Site Reliability monitoring is also very important. If some code deployed in production misbehaves or breaks, the SRE team should get alert and immediate rectification should be done. TechGig team has its own set of inhouse homegrown tools for monitoring and alert.

Application Security

Bad actors consistently try to steal the user’s personal, financial data. To protect users and data, we have a comprehensive application security program in which from requirements gathering to production deployment in all steps security is embedded. We use Static Code analysis to identify security gaps within the code. To identify security gaps in production live application we use Dynamic security assessments. Apart from this to identify business logic vulnerabilities extensive manual security assessments are done periodically.

Apart from the above-mentioned pieces, there are a lot of other components which contribute to TechGig tech stack. The technologies are subject to change depending on new requirements and challenges. What makes our work interesting is the problem statement we are solving i.e. help the developer community to learn to compete and grow.

About the author

Ram Awasthi is the Head-Technology of TechGig & TimesJobs and VP- Technology, Times Internet.

Tags agility, scalability, tech stack

Tips

10 Tips to help you build strong coding skills

Post author By Yan Fan
Post date November 7, 2019
No Comments on 10 Tips to help you build strong coding skills

Best practices for learning how to code

So, you’ve finished your first introductory coding course, but you don’t know what to do next. We’ve created this article to give you tips on what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do when you’re taking your first steps as a developer and trying to build strong coding skills.
Although this was originally designed for applicants preparing for the Code Chrysalis Immersive technical interview, it has useful information for anyone looking to take their next steps as a new developer!
Let’s get right into it. Here’s some advice to help you take your skills to the next level.

Tip 1: Be careful about coding challenge websites

Ignore the top scorers…for now. Oftentimes, the code solutions that get the top scores on websites like CodeWars and Coderbyte are not examples of good code. This is because the websites are games, and part of the game for developers is to see how short they can get their solutions.
While these solutions work, they are not necessarily what would be recommended in a professional setting. Why? That leads us to our next piece of advice.

Tip 2: Write code for people

We write code for people, and it is run by computers. Not the other way around. Short code does not always mean clear code.
If you take the code from coding challenge sites, you run the risk of interacting without fully understanding the code in question. If you’re new to coding, these often involve techniques or concepts that are a few levels above what you should be focusing on.
Comprehension is key.

Tip 3: Passing tests are useless if you do not know why

It can be easy to throw a bunch of ideas against a wall and see what sticks. But it would be even better if you knew why it sticks. For beginners and experienced devs alike, it is key to also understand the why’s.
If you do not understand “why” for basic topics, how will you understand “why” for advanced topics?

Tip 4: Be careful of copy-pasting code from StackOverflow or blogs

Make sure you know why something works (or does not work). Invest the time to understand the fundamentals. Another problem with StackOverflow – or blogs – is that they can be wrong, whether intentional or not. They can also be outdated.

Stay vigilant about the material or answers you are looking at.

Tip 5: Familiarize yourself with reading documentation

Reading documentation (on-line manuals) is an important skill. Frankly, it is a skill that many working developers lack, so building up this skill early will set you apart.
You can find JavaScript documentation on the Mozilla Developer Network. It can be intimidating to read and you will not be able to understand everything you read for quite a while. But that’s ok.

If you can learn just one new thing every time you try to read the documentation, you are making solid progress.

Tip 6: Learn to do things without native methods first

If you are using .forEach and .map for everything, I suggest you try solving problems without using any of those.
We want to be able to understand how these built-in methods work before using them. If you do not know how to do things without them, you will always be coding half-blind.

Make sure you have 20/20 vision. Your career will thank you for it.

Tip 7: Check your assumptions by running and checking your code often

Do not be afraid to use console.log to print things out.
Always double check.
Be aware of what data you have access to at any given point in your code.

Make sure that you test your assumptions — are you sure that variable is a function? A string? A number?

Sometimes, what you think is a 2 is instead a ‘2’ and that can make a big difference in code. Use console.log and also typeof to double-check that what you think is true.

This will also protect you from bugs. It can be frustrating to write a bunch of code, only to run it at the end and realize that there is something wrong. Protect yourself from making these mistakes before you reach the end.

Tip 8: Error messages are your friends

When you see an error message appear, this is actually something to welcome.

Familiarize yourself with common error messages and what they mean — do not ignore them. Learn to read them so you can use them to your advantage.

Error messages will also give you a line number in your code where the error originated from. If it isn’t immediately clear what the error message means, Google it!

As you get more advanced, you will come across silent errors. The evil twin of error messages. These are situations where something is not working, but you do not have a handy error message telling you where it is going wrong. They are the worst.

So, next time you see an error message pop up, give them a big hug and thank you. And then listen to them.

We’ve listed some common error messages for beginner coders below:

Uncaught ReferenceError: ______is not defined>

This usually happens because a variable or function name is missing; the JavaScript engine is not sure what you are referring to.

Are you sure you spelled everything correctly? Are all of your variables declared? Did you copy/paste code? (Please don’t copy-paste code without understanding it)

Uncaught SyntaxError: Function statements require a function name
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier.

Did you forget a closing or opening bracket or parenthesis? That is usually the case.

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property>

This often happens when you are trying to read a property or call a method on an undefined object. Are you using a method that does not exist on an object? Is your object defined?

For more information, check out this helpful article.

Tip 9: Go slow and review often

It feels a little counter-intuitive, right?

Review concepts that you think you are already familiar with often. You will probably always come across something new. Try seeing if you can understand more MDN documentation each time.

You are learning the fundamental building blocks that will support your career. Spend time making sure this foundation is as strong as possible. Do not be ashamed of going back to review strings and numbers, even if you think you already know how to use them. There is always more to learn before you build strong coding skills.

So while React can seem really attractive, if you do not have a good grasp of the basics, it will be a struggle and waste of effort.

Tip 10: Make it work, then make it pretty

Do not stress about making your code look elegant. First, get it working. Then, we can go back and clean it up.

Working and ugly is better than broken and…still broken!

About the author:

===

Yan Fan is Code Chrysalis’ CTO and Co-Founder. Born in China and raised in Seattle, she graduated from Dartmouth College with degrees in Economics and Arabic. After graduation, Yan worked at Bunge Global Agribusiness, a commodities trading house. After a career change into tech, Yan worked as a software engineer at Ayasdi, a leading Silicon Valley machine learning startup, and as an instructor for Hack Reactor’s prep course.

Code Chrysalis is Yan’s second coding bootcamp–with Hack Reactor, she co-founded and served as CTO of a coding school in Jordan helping refugees in 2016.

Tags beginner coding, coding best practices, coding skills

Community

Developer Economics Survey Q2 2019 Prize Winners!

Post author By Vanessa Measom
Post date October 10, 2019
No Comments on Developer Economics Survey Q2 2019 Prize Winners!

We’re excited to announce the full list of our prize winners for Developer Economics survey Q2 2019. ?

Congratulations to all the winners! If you’d like to join our developer community and win prizes like these, find out more here.

Winners have already been notified by email – if you recognise the email fragment as yours and we haven’t contacted you, please drop us an email at community@developereconomics.com.

Please note that the list only includes prize-draw winners and not runner-ups. If the prize draw winners do not claim their prizes within the time frame mentioned in the respective e-mail they received, then runner-ups will be asked to claim them instead.

via GIPHY
===

Exclusive Community Prize Draw for members with 801+ points – Prizes: Microsoft Surface Pro 6 and OnePlus 6T.

Winner	Prize
t********@l.c*, Croatia	Microsoft Surface Pro 6
n******@y*.c.i*, UAE	OnePlus 6T

Exclusive Community Prize Draw for members with 801+ points – Prizes: branded hoodies, hats, stickers, socks, online courses and vouchers.

Winner	Prize
v******@o**.c, India	Developer Economics stickers & socks
n*.b*@g.c, Finland	Developer Economics stickers & socks
c************@y*.f, Algeria	Developer Economics stickers & socks
m*********@c****.i, Canada	Developer Economics stickers & socks
j******@g.c, South Africa	Developer Economics stickers & socks
k*******@o**.c, Trinidad & Tobago	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
a******@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
n*****@g.c, Iran	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
m*********@g.c, Egypt	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
p**.a*@g.c, Italy	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
j******@g.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers & hat
m***@c**.c, Malaysia	Developer Economics stickers & hat
m*******@h**.c, Greece	Developer Economics stickers & hat
d*******@g.c, Canada	Developer Economics stickers & hat
c**@h**.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers & hat
n***@g.c, Canada	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher
a******@l.c*, India	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher
t*****.h**@g.d*, Germany	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher
v******@t*.c.m*, Mexico	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher
r****@g.c, Canada	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher

Exclusive Community Prize Draw for members with 501+ points – Prizes: branded hoodies, hats, stickers, socks, online course and gear.

Winner	Prize
m****@g.c, Germany	Developer Economics stickers & socks
d**@f*******.c, Australia	Developer Economics stickers & socks
j*****.h*@h**.c, Austria	Developer Economics stickers & socks
d******@g.c, United Kingdom	Developer Economics stickers & socks
a****.p*****@g.c, Spain	Developer Economics stickers & socks
a**.s******@g.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers & socks
d**********@h***.i, Italy	Developer Economics stickers & socks
p**@p******.n*, Australia	Developer Economics stickers & socks
v*****@g.c, Latvia	Developer Economics stickers & socks
f****@o**.c, Malaysia	Developer Economics stickers & socks
b*****@g.c, El Salvador	Developer Economics stickers & socks
k************@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers & socks
d****.m@g.c, Canada	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
b******.o*@g.c, Mexico	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
m******@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
m******@g.c, Canada	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
l*********@g.c, Canada	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
f*********@l.c*, Canada	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher
j****@g.c, United Kingdom	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher
r*****.p***@o***.i, Italy	$50 Udemy course or Amazon voucher

Exclusive Community Prize Draw for members with 301+ points – Prizes: branded hoodies, stickers, socks.

Winner	Prize
l****@g.c, Argentina	Developer Economics stickers & socks
a****@g.c, France	Developer Economics stickers & socks
m***.t*****@g.c, Lithuania	Developer Economics stickers & socks
t*****@g.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers & socks
b**.e.d@g**.c, Japan	Developer Economics stickers & socks
x*****@n.c, Korea, South	Developer Economics stickers & socks
e*****@y*.i, Italy	Developer Economics stickers & socks
b****@g.c, Russia	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
d*****@g.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie
k*.m*.d*@g.c, Hungary	Developer Economics stickers & hoodie

General draw prize winners

Winner	Prize
a*******@g.c, Russia	Microsoft Surface Pro 6
g***********@g.c, India	Oculus Rift S
j************@y.c, United States	AWS Deep Racer
d@d********.c, Dominican Republic	Samsung HMD Odyssey
d**@a**.c, Turkey	Samsung Chromebook 3
i************@g.c, United States	Samsung Chromebook 3
h**.z***.3@g**.c, Brunei	Choice of JetBrains IDE
b************@g.c, Poland	6 months SitePoint Premium Subscription
a***.j**@g.c, India	6 months SitePoint Premium Subscription
a**********@g.c, India	6 months SitePoint Premium Subscription
m******@g.c, Moldova	6 months SitePoint Premium Subscription
d*******@o**.c, Finland	6 months SitePoint Premium Subscription
j*****.j@h**.c, United States	Apple AirPods
a****.a.2.k@g*.c, India	3d printer
o****************@g.c, Nigeria	3d printer
m.q********.8@g**.c, Egypt	Tello
2****@g.c, Russia	Amazon Echo
a***********@g.c, Spain	Amazon Echo
L**.P**@g.c, United States	Amazon Echo
a.g**@g.c, India	$30 Easyspace gift voucher
d************@g.c, India	$30 Easyspace gift voucher
e*****@g.c, Russia	$25 Virtual Visa Card
N*****@y.c, South Africa	$25 Virtual Visa Card
o******@t**.c.z*, South Africa	$25 Virtual Visa Card
a***********@g.c, Vietnam	$25 Virtual Visa Card
k***.2**@g.c, India	$25 Virtual Visa Card
j******@h**.c, Portugal	$25 Virtual Visa Card
a@a*******.c, Spain	$25 Virtual Visa Card
e**@c*.c.u*, United Kingdom	$25 Virtual Visa Card
h**.t*@g.c, Vietnam	$25 Virtual Visa Card
n*.a.m@g.c, Romania	$25 Virtual Visa Card
n****@g.c, India	$15 Dev.to voucher
m*****@g.c, Vietnam	$15 Dev.to voucher
j.v******@m.c**, United Kingdom	$15 Dev.to voucher
h****@g.c, France	$15 Dev.to voucher
o********@g.c, Kenya	$15 Dev.to voucher
a******@g.c, United States	$15 Dev.to voucher
a**@t.c*, Canada	$15 Dev.to voucher
e**.b**.s@g**.c, United Kingdom	$15 Dev.to voucher
b@l*******.c, Finland	$15 Dev.to voucher
j**@o*****.c.z*, South Africa	$15 Dev.to voucher
d******@g.c, Czech Republic	$15 Dev.to voucher
a******@g.c, Ukraine	$15 Dev.to voucher
H*********@g.c, Nigeria	$15 Dev.to voucher
n**************@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers
d******@g.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers
d.a****@g.c, Russia	Developer Economics stickers
c****@d.a, France	Developer Economics stickers
a********@g.c, Moldova	Developer Economics stickers
d****.g@g.c, Italy	Developer Economics stickers
b**********@g.c, Nigeria	Developer Economics stickers
j*************@c*.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers
n*****@w.p*, Poland	Developer Economics stickers
i.p**@v*.n, United Kingdom	Developer Economics stickers
a************@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers
e***.h@g.c, France	Developer Economics stickers
h**********@g.c, Nigeria	Developer Economics stickers
h**********@g.c, Ghana	Developer Economics stickers
j********@g.c, Spain	Developer Economics stickers
b*****@g.c, Uganda	Developer Economics stickers
m*******@g.c, Portugal	Developer Economics stickers
e*.c**.9@g**.c, Russia	Developer Economics stickers
h*************@g.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers
m******@y.c, Philippines	Developer Economics stickers
a*@v*.c, United Kingdom	Developer Economics stickers
i.x.y@g*.c, United States	Developer Economics stickers
k********@g.c, United Kingdom	Developer Economics stickers
k***************@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers
j@w*****.c, Canada	Developer Economics stickers
b*.g****@c.o.i, India	Developer Economics stickers
d**********@h***.i, Italy	Developer Economics stickers
f*****.z***@g.c, Uruguay	Developer Economics stickers
m*******@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers
i***@g.c, India	Developer Economics stickers
e*****@b***.e, United States	Developer Economics powerbanks
g****.d**@g.c, Greece	Developer Economics powerbanks
c***.c**@g.c, Mexico	Developer Economics powerbanks
l*******@h***.c.u*, South Africa	Developer Economics powerbanks
a*******@g.c, Russia	Developer Economics powerbanks
k**************@g.c, Russia	Developer Economics powerbanks
m***@n****.n, Italy	Developer Economics powerbanks
k******@k****.c, Spain	Developer Economics powerbanks
a***@r****.c.b*, Brazil	Developer Economics powerbanks
c***********@g.c, Vietnam	Developer Economics powerbanks
f.p*****@g.c, Italy	Developer Economics powerbanks
k**********@g.c, Vietnam	Developer Economics powerbanks
g******@y.c, Israel	Developer Economics powerbanks
d****@m.r, Russia	Developer Economics powerbanks
c*****.m**@g.c, Nigeria	Developer Economics powerbanks
e*.b.k*@h**.c, Turkey	Developer Economics powerbanks
i*@p********.c, Czech Republic	Developer Economics powerbanks
a******.a****@g.c, India	Developer Economics powerbanks
m******@h**.c, Turkey	Developer Economics powerbanks
l**********@g.c, Vietnam	Developer Economics powerbanks

Extra Prize Winners (respondents could enter extra draws depending on the areas of interest they participated in).

s*.m*@d**********.c, United States	$40 Easyspace gift voucher
o******@y.c, India	Amazon Echo
d*****@g.c, Argentina	Developer Economics socks
1******@g.c, Ukraine	Echo Dot
k******@g.c, Greece	$40 Redbubble voucher
f******@m.n.j, Japan	WeMo Mini Smart Plug
s************@g.c, Greece	ModernistLook MAX II backpack
b*.b.c@g.c, United States	JBL GO 2 Bluetooth speaker
v****@g.c, Vietnam	Developer Economics socks
e*************@g.c, Russia	Echo Dot
m***.f***@o**.c, Austria	Developer Economics socks
o**********@g.c, United States	Whoosh! Screen Cleaner
v********@g.c, India	Amazon Echo
p****@g.c, India	Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+
M***.S@w.d*, Germany	Developer Economics socks
d*@d*****.n, United States	Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Power Strip
a*****@y**.r, Russia	$30 ThinkGeek gift card
b@n****.i, United States	Developer Economics socks
c********@g.c, Russia	Google Home Hub Smart Display
p**********@g.c, India	WITTI Design BEDDI Glow
k*****@g.c, India	$20 Udemy voucher
n***@g.c, Russia	Clean Code by Bob Martin
p*****.c@g.c, India	JBL GO 2 Portable Speaker
s******@g.c, South Africa	Developer Economics socks

Tags developer community, winners

Tools

What have developers been reading

Post author By Lindsay Smith
Post date October 3, 2019
No Comments on What have developers been reading

The latest topics developers are reading

While novel readers were busy paging through murder mysteries and historical fiction this past spring, developer interests were data and analytics, Jakarta, cloud-native articles, Kubernetes and open source.

That’s what we discovered when we took a look at quarter-over-quarter pageview trends in DZone.com. A little background: 29 million unique readers visit each year. The research is based on article tags assigned by DZone editors and used to help readers search once they’re on our site. They aren’t keywords.

Consuming All Things Data in the Data Category

Our first pass researching tags occurred in the first quarter, when interest in data analytics and tools articles skyrocketed. Same situation for Q2 vs Q1. Our findings did show that readership shifted away from the data scientist tagline toward specific tools and data strategies that anyone can implement.

Of the fastest-growing data analysis topics, the data analysis tools tag grew over 30X, and related topics like ingesting data (the collection of data into/out of the database for immediate use) and augmented analytics (machine learning-powered data analysis) grew about 10X more popular with readers.

Terms like ingesting data and augmented analytics speak to the need for more than just a dashboard approach to consuming data. Tim Spann, a Big Data thought leader and field engineer at Cloudera, thinks a consolidation in analytics is underway.

“I think there’s going to be consolidation. And a lot of startups are going to try to integrate a couple of these things together. They’re going to try to add more features and differentiate themselves. You’re going to see more of the data analytics tools try to do ingest and vice versa, (so) they’ll be a more interactive platform,” he explains.

“You’re getting more data, you need to be able to ingest, you need to be able to analyze it, you need to be able to build apps out of them — it’s not just enough to have a static report, or even a dashboard that people look at, people actually have uses for this data.”

From Java EE to Jakarta

After Oracle announced in 2017 that they were handing over Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, a few changes began to take place. One was that Enterprise Java would now be called Jakarta EE.

In the second quarter of this year, the Eclipse Foundation announced that all Jakarta specifications with “javax.*” must be changed to “jakarta.*” This had the potential to significantly impact, and potentially harm, existing Enterprise Java applications.

It’s no surprise that developers were on DZone searching for the best ways to comply with these changes. We saw a lot of growth in all related topic tags, including Enterprise Java, which grew 10 times more popular, and Jakarta, which grew over 35 times more popular in Q2.

Apps and Cloud-Native Development

Cloud-native development is drastically changing the way we build applications. The term cloud-native refers to a style of container-based development that creates applications from scratch, or refactors older applications, to be fully optimized for the cloud. This is very different from older application development philosophies that retroactively adjusted apps to be cloud-enabled using methods like lift-and-shift or re-platforming.

According to this article on what it means to be cloud-native, the applications contain three major traits. They are container-centric, dynamically managed (i.e., containers are managed and organized by Kubernetes or other similar platforms), and microservices-oriented.

From Q1 to Q2, many aspects of cloud development showed steady growth. However, topics specific to cloud-native development grew exponentially, with the term itself showing over 300% growth last quarter.

Related tags that also showed an increase included:

Cloud-based microservices (500%)
Cloud-native deployment (140%)
Scaling microservices (160%)

“The cloud-native ecosystem will see explosive growth as the growing adoption of Kubernetes will translate to a growing need to make it manageable for the enterprise. There are both huge gaps in tooling and many unrealized opportunities in making fleets of microservices more manageable — and we expect to see projects sprout up to handle both the gaps and the opportunities,” said Gwen Shapira, Data Architect at Confluent, in this interview with DZone.

Is Kubernetes the King of Development?

Kubernetes is the largest cloud-native platform designed to manage, scale, and deploy containers. As cloud-native development continues to grow, so does interest in Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes is a game changer. It’s slowly taking over the way the Internet works as far as application development and deployment,” explains Bob Reselman, an industry analyst and technical educator.

“It’s all changing so fast. Every five years, the stack is changing. Because of this, developers are finding themselves in a constant state of adaptivity and looking for the next best tool and ways to manage, scale, and deploy applications.”

Not surprisingly, we found topic tags related to Kubernetes and Kubernetes deployment showing tremendous growth from Q1 to Q2, including:

k8s — another name for Kubernetes (7X more popular).
Kubeadm — a fast-path command for creating a Kubernetes cluster (151%).
Kubelet — a command that runs individual Kubernetes nodes (118%).
Kubernetes services — rules and abstractions for Kubernetes pods (85%).
GKE — Google Kubernetes Engine (66% growth).

Open Source Topics Remain Popular Developer Interests

Nearly all of the above-mentioned topic tags contain one common theme: Open source.

The open-source topics that saw the most growth include:

Open APIs (11X).
Open source big data tools (200%).
Open source communities (110%).

Additionally, we saw growth in a wide range of open-source tools and platforms — some mentioned above, like Kubernetes, Apache, Jakarta, RSocket, and many more.

As the stack continues to change and evolve, developers will seek out open-source software first. Without question. Kubernetes, data tools like Apache Spark and Kafka— all open source, all dominating the ecosystem and rank high in developer interests.

“I believe enterprises will increasingly turn to managed platforms delivering 100% open-source technologies in 2019, as they increasingly seek to avoid the vendor and technological lock-in that remain too common with proprietary open source offerings,” explained Ben Slater, CPO at Instaclustr, in an interview with DZone late last year.

“Given the fact that commercialized open-source technologies can leave enterprises at the mercy of price increases (and make it impossible to run solutions on their own or implement useful modifications), fully open-source technologies offer a compelling alternative.”

“Open-source solutions are empowered by engaged communities that help ensure rapid improvements and bug resolution, better security, full transparency and reliability, and a faster time to market at a lower cost.”

About the author:

Lindsay is a Content Coordinator at Devada. She works closely with contributors to DZone, a website for software developers and IT professionals to learn and share their knowledge. Editing and reviewing submissions to the site, she specializes in content related to Java, IoT, and software security.

Tags Analytics, cloud-native, data, Jakara, Kubernites, open source

Community

Another Successful Developer Economics Survey came to an end!

Post author By Dimitris Terzis
Post date September 18, 2019
No Comments on Another Successful Developer Economics Survey came to an end!

The Developer Economics Survey runs twice every year, reaching out to all types of developers, from curious weekend hobbyists to enterprise & professional devs with years of coding experience, and to students in need to sharpen their skills. Our vision is to help developers become not only better at coding but offer the necessary resources to enhance their developer skills & make smarter business decisions. In our survey participation, we strive for diversity, including developers from around the world and from all development areas.

Another Developer Economics Survey came to an end on the 13th of August.

The Developer Economics Q2 2019 Survey ran from the 19th of June and once again it has been very exciting, fun and nerve racking! During this period, developers from all over the world, with various backgrounds had their voices heard. Here are some survey fast facts:

We ran for 9 weeks
Covered 9 languages (English, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese Simplified & Traditional, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian) and
9 areas of development (Web, Mobile, Desktop, Cloud, AR/VR, IoT, Games, Machine Learning and Data Science)
Communicated internally through 9 different Slack channels on survey updates & alerts
Realised that 9 is our lucky number
Reached 179 countries
We read through more than 5,100 feedback comments (still answering these)
We received 3 comments requesting more kittens and 5 comments requesting more beer (both suggestions are now in the backlog).

We use our Developer Economics survey as an opportunity to give back to the developer community.

For each completed response to the Developer Economics Survey, we donate a small amount of money to the Raspberry Pi Foundation which supports young coders in the making. The idea is simple – the more responses we get, the more money we’ll donate. So, in essence, developers who participate are the ones who contribute in giving back to the community. We try to support different organizations in each survey wave. We welcome input from our respondents, so feel free to share any non profit organizations that support the developer community, in the comments below.

The Developer Economics community is also about fun and games, making it worthwhile for devs to invest time to take and promote the survey. In each survey wave we have prize draws and a very engaging referral program. We try to cover all tastes and always include licences and courses so developers can use rewards to improve their skills. All developers who provide their contact details are eligible to enter the draws. How do we select prizes? We research, ask for our own teams’ developers input, and we always take into account the feedback provided by previous survey winners. Here is what we had for you during the Q2 2019 DE survey:

OnePlus 6T
Microsoft Surface Pro
Oculus Rift S
Amazon Gift cards
Coding courses
Programming tools
And many more in our full list

There are extra prizes for those who complete additional questions in their area of expertise. In this way, the more responses you provide the more chances you have to win! Developers who take the survey are notified for these extra prizes and get to choose the prize they would prefer to win.

Our referral program includes developers from all over the world supporting us to reach as many developers from their communities as possible, and in return, they can win awesome cash prizes if they make it to the top of the leaderboard. Everyone who made it to the Top 50 won cash and the amazing referrer who made it to the top won $1,000 USD. But irrespective of whether you won or not, from all of us on the Developer Economics Team, thank you! You have contributed in the best possible way in helping developers understand the world and the world understand developers – which is our goal and what keeps us going.

After the survey closes and the data is crunched, we provide the survey participants with early access to key findings. These come via our State of the Developer Nation (SoN) Report and the Developer Benchmarks Graphs. Here you can download the previous SoN report – 16th edition- while waiting for the next one to be published in a few weeks’ time. You can find the Developer Benchmark graphs here to make sure you know your industry & stay competitive.

What more is there for those who participate? Here is what they have shared with us:

“Thanks for the nice survey. This time, not only I answered some interesting questions, but also learned something new on software products and technologies. Well done!”

“I think this is a good survey, I also noticed some technologies I didn’t know existed. However it was very interesting filling this survey.”

“Like the last Developer Economics Survey, this one helped me think that I have a lot to learn and also how I can do it, like what I have to do to achieve my goals. So thank you one more time. Looking forward to next DE survey.”

One of the most interesting parts of our surveys is the feedback we get from respondents. Our team always takes time to read the suggestions provided. Some of them were related to the duration of the survey, others highlighted areas we didn’t cover extensively. We take into account all feedback provided and do our best to include all areas and topics while not increasing the survey duration by much, as we realise it is already quite lengthy. If of interest, we have put together a blogpost with the most fun & interesting survey feedback we received. Enjoy it here.

From all of us in the Developer Economics Team, thank you for being a part of this journey! If this was your first time taking one of our surveys, thank you for joining us. In case you haven’t done so already, you can join our community here. Together we are creating the foundations of a world that is friendlier to developers.

Watch out for the prize draw results, the announcement of the winners, and the reports published in the following days featuring the latest trends & insights.

We hope to see you again in a future Developer Economics Survey!

Tags developer community, surveys

Community

Bug fixes, fresh knowledge, kittens and beer: What devs want from Developer Economics

Post author By Dimitris Terzis
Post date September 6, 2019
No Comments on Bug fixes, fresh knowledge, kittens and beer: What devs want from Developer Economics

Developer Economics is the largest developer research program, engaging thousands of developers of all shapes and sizes across the globe. We are the analyst of the developer economy, answering “what do devs want?”.

Twice per year, during the Developer Economics Survey, developers from all over the world, from all areas of coding, have their say in crucial matters around the developer community and share their views to shape the future of coding. The mission of Developer Economics is to “Help the world understand developers and developers understand the world”.

The Q2 2019 DE Survey, was launched on the 19th of June and was officially closed on August 13th. During this time, the developer community supported our mission not only by taking the survey but also by providing insightful & valuable feedback.

In total, we received over 5,100 messages as feedback. Our team read through all of the comments, shortlisted improvements that we want to include in our future surveys and we are currently assessing them to prioritize implementation for our next wave. We received a lot of suggestions about new questions we could include, concerns about the length of our survey, and we were informed about a few bugs or translation problems some of our users ran into. We also received a lot of enthusiastic comments thanking us for the survey and we were excited to read that a lot of the participants learned from our survey as well! A few devs asked us for more kittens while others requested for some beer!

Here are a few of these that we found rewarding:

“Nothing was left out!”
“Looks good to me. It was a detailed survey which covered almost every aspect of a programmer’s life 🙂 Best of luck for future endeavours!” – Siddhesh, India
“Thanks for doing all this work. Good luck on collating all the data and building the report. Really looking forward to the results!”
“What your doing right now is pretty good, keep doing it”
“[…]I love the effort put in by developers economics I am totally grateful that I and my fellow developers in Nigeria and the rest of the world were given this opportunity to express ourselves. Whenever the survey is opened I will love to be part of it again and help spread it.” – Okpako Moses, Nigeria

A few insightful:

“Should create more questions for beginners like me. Thank you.”
“Adding a section for Open Source Software will help a lot next time.” – Kenji Rikitake, Japan
“More jokes” – Camilo Cervantes Salazar, Colombia
“Already great, maybe a much dynamic UI”
“Have a dark theme on your survey website for all of the dark theme-loving developers ;)”

And here are some we thought are hilarious:

“Needs pictures of cats.”
“Free beer”
“What the f**k”

This is only a tiny sample of all the feedback we receive every day here during the surveys and we are happy to read every single one of them! We may not be perfect yet, but with your help, we are improving after each survey wave. So, thank you for taking the time to let us know your thoughts and “what devs want”.

What else do devs want?

We like to give back to all the developers who took the time to participate in our survey. We will run our prize draws and announce the winners early in September, so keep an eye out for that! All survey participants will have early access to our State of Developer Nation Report 17th Edition, which will be published shortly after and will contain all key findings from this survey. Didn’t take part but want to receive a copy of the free report? Sign up here to receive access when it’s live.

From all of us at Developer Economics, thank you! Your contribution means a lot to us. We hope to see you again in our next survey.

Tags beer, developer community, kittens, survey feedback, what devs want

Platforms

Game On! AR vs VR

Here at /Data we offer certainty to those that are speculating about software developers: who they are, what they are choosing to do with at work and with their hobby time, and how they are doing it. We consider ourselves the analysts of the developer economy and often say that we help the world to understand developers…and developers to understand their world. ARVR

“Google Cardboard 3d, 360 degree video viewer” by mr.racy is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Two of the areas that we are often asked about by big businesses with skin in the game are Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Part of my job is to brief top tier organisations on what the developer audience is focussed upon so the companies can make the best decisions. I don’t speculate — I’m not brave enough for that. Instead, like every analyst at the company, I use our data to find trends and outliers in this emerging sector.

How do we get the data? We ask the people at the coal face, the developers. We do this twice a year through one of the largest and broadest surveys in the developer calendar. We have a set of questions about AR/VR which we update regularly to find out how the latest frameworks and hardware are faring, and which programming languages are most popular. We can tie the data back to the types of apps that developers are creating, whether they work professionally or as hobbyists, and where they are based, among other things. We write reports after analysing the data, which you can find here. The AR/VR reports are in the “Emerging” category.

In the rest of this blog post, I’m going to share a few key facts that we gathered in a recent wave of our survey (Q2 2018). We currently have another survey running and would love to include your opinions; if you share them with us, there’s the chance to win some awesome prizes. Interested? Take the survey.

ARVR development is immature

OK, that probably came out wrong! AR/VR development is still not a mature area in that it’s hardly established in the same way as desktop or web development. We generally use the more polite term “nascent” to describe an area where most of the developers working in it are hobbyists, though often professionals in other sectors, or students. In nascent areas, we find most developers are simply trying out ideas to find out more about the basics of the technology and work out where to go with it.

ARVR development is increasing in popularity, with over 20% of our survey respondents saying they had worked on such a project in the past 12 months. Given our estimates of the total worldwide developer population, that gives a global population of AR/VR developers of over 5M.

We see a high number of young, inexperienced developers in this area, which is another sign of a sector that hasn’t yet settled down sufficiently for businesses to build a stable ecosystem of professional developers within it. It’s a sign of churn, where developers try the technology and move on. Most AR/VR apps are developed within the games category and, where they are not, their developers are still uncertain of their audience. Among AR/VR developers, almost 2 out of 3 are not so much bothered about making revenue from their efforts, but are simply interested in gaining experience.

Virtual reality

Hardware moves rapidly in this sector, and we find ourselves updating our question set for each survey as acquisitions and closures affect the vendor marketplace.

When it comes to VR, developers are clearly keen on sexy dedicated hardware such as Oculus. But our data reveals that the same number of VR developers work with the cheaper, smartphone-based option Google Cardboard. The hardware created by a range of third party device manufacturers, incorporating the Windows 10 Mixed Reality platform (which can also be used for VR) is also highly popular with VR developers.

Augmented Reality

AR is a very different beast to VR. It’s well-suited for a smartphone platform, most famously made popular by Pokémon Go. Huge investments by Apple and Google are paying off. They are keen to get you developing on their platforms because of the massive potential within the app stores (again, see Pokémon Go for an example).

ARCore on Android and ARKit on iOS are the platforms of choice for AR development by some margin. The most popular wearable for AR is Microsoft HoloLens, as Magic Leap had yet to be launched at the time of the survey. It will be interesting to see how things have changed now that device is out of the closet. So, if you’re working on this newest of hardware, tell us about it in the survey!

AR is the simple, more accessible end of the spectrum for developers. The spectrum crosses from more sophisticated mixed reality up to full-blown virtual reality. Developers are finding that AR is a good place to start, particularly during this period where underlying technology and hardware undergoes rapid evolution and pricing levels for consumers start to wobble. Starting with AR, developers can learn how to blend virtual elements ever more seamlessly into the real world, and take their experience later into the convergence zone as virtual reality becomes a more realistic proposition for users and developers alike. It’s the gateway for many, and we are seeing more growth in AR than VR for this reason.

https://youtu.be/r87hy0bdUh8?t=85

What about working cross platform?

Fragmentation is real, and being able to deploy across a range of hardware is always attractive. If you’re a game developer, and even if you are not, Unity and Unreal provide sophisticated cross platform development and tools that include ARVR. They do come with a steep learning curve so we find them mostly popular with those already initiated (e.g. game devs). Other platforms such as Lens Studio, Spark AR and Sumerian are empowering AR developers, and we want to find out how popular they are becoming in the developer community.

To get this kind of useful information, and more, we need you in the survey this time around! We want to know what languages you are using, the hardware, the platforms, and the apps you are creating. Has the new Oculus Quest has piqued your interest and restarted the heart of VR development? Or is AR and mixed reality where it’s at? Why not take the chance to tell us? Help us tell the teams behind these products what you are deciding, so they can do their best to support you.

Have your say. Take the survey.

Tags AR, AR/VR, augmented reality, virtual reality, VR

Platforms

Choosing the right Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) – or not

Post author By Peter Crocker
Post date July 23, 2019
No Comments on Choosing the right Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) – or not

The emergence of cloud native development and containers has redefined how software is developed. But not all organizations have the resources or expertise to set up the required infrastructure to support a containerized application. Luckily, cloud vendors offer Containers-as-a-Service to help developers to capitalize on the benefits of cloud native development.

All three leading cloud providers have CaaS products but choosing the right one can be a challenge. While everyone has different requirements, it is always beneficial to understand what solutions others are using and why, to help inform decisions.

Based on research from /Data’s recent Developer Economics survey, we have discovered that there are a few factors that drive developers to choose one CaaS over another:

familiarity with tools and languages
integration with other systems
support and documentation
ease and speed of development.

While there were other reasons for developers to consider when adopting a platform, the percentage of developers that considered these four factors important is noticeably different across the three leaders. Some of the other sixteen factors that are tracked in the research include:

pricing
community
learning curve
suitability and feature set
performance
scalability

Not all CaaS platforms are selected for the same reasons though. Developers that chose AWS Elastic Container Service were more likely to choose it because of its integration with other systems. This is a reason to choose AWS ECS for 34% of developers using it, compared to 29% and 28% for Azure and Google. Amazon not only has a vast array of tools and services, they also have a robust partner network. The options are so great they have their own service marketplace and have even released a Cloud Map service to help developers discover and manage it all.

Developers tend to favor Google Container Engine (GCE) because it is easy to use and well documented. Forty five percent of GCE developers chose it in part because of the support and documentation and 36% because of ease and speed of development. We tend to find that developers are consistently happy with the support and documentation that Google provides to their developer community. This satisfaction is an important reason for Google Container Engine users to choose the platform.

For Azure Container Service, developers like the fact that they can use the tools and languages that they are familiar with. Azure developers are 7 and 12 percentage points more likely to choose Azure Container Service for this reason than Amazon and Google respectively. Our research shows that Microsoft developers are relatively brand loyal so Azure has made it easy for developers to use Microsoft tools for container development and management. Azure has enabled developers to develop using Docker containers and Visual Studio, tools to deploy code to Azure Container Service with a simple command. They have also made it possible to deploy Docker containers to Windows Servers. Finally integration with Active Directory enables loyal Microsoft developers to use existing authentication policies and technologies .

At the end of the day, most developers are looking for a platform that is easy to use and fits with their current strategy and infrastructure, whether it is though integrations, support, or the ability to use the tools that they are comfortable with.

Containers: Is it really a choice of either or?

While each solution has unique benefits, our analysis also found that many developers were using more than one leading CaaS and in some cases three. Seven percent of developers using a CaaS were using all three of the leading platforms while 46% were using two.

Our data verifies what you may already suspect based on your own experiences: more than half of backend developers are pursuing a multi cloud strategy, choosing not to commit to a single provider.

There are a number of benefits to a multi-cloud solution that are driving this trend. IT organizations can avoid vendor lockin if teams develop for a multi cloud environment. This approach forces developers to build without relying on vendor specific services, reducing switching costs. Multi-cloud approaches also enables organizations to optimize their infrastructure. Developers and operations pro’s can leverage the strengths of each cloud depending on the requirements of various workloads and applications. Greater resilience is also a key benefit to consider. This is especially important in denial of service attacks where compute resources can be overwhelmed with fake requests. With a backup cloud ready and waiting, workloads can just shift to the backup cloud.

The choice of either one CaaS or the other will become even less relevant in the future as leading vendors are all standardizing on Kubernetes. Amazon and Azure are promoting Kubenetes-specific CaaS offerings to focus more on Kubernetes as the underlying orchestration engine. Azure is actually migrating all its users to the Kubernetes service. With Kubernetes the standard orchestration engine, migrating apps and container across cloud providers becomes much easier.

We are also seeing Amazon and Azure working to make it more convenient to develop using containers and Kubernetes. Both firms are offering clusterless or serverless Kubernetes services such as Fargate from AWS and Azure Container Instance. These solutions enable developers to just deploy containers without having to worry about servers or clusters. This approach will make it easier for developers but the additional level of abstraction also reduces flexibility and increases switching costs.

Amazon’s open sourcing of Firecracker, the micro VM that supports the serverless platform Lambda and Fargate, will be another interesting development to watch. This may prove to be Amazon’s response to Kubernetes but for the serverless market. While still a ways off this could lead to a serverless ecosystem that is just as flexible as the container landscape.

What do you think?

Do you feel strongly about the container solution you are using?

Or perhaps you feel poorly about certain other containers.

Let us know about it and have your voice heard by taking the Developer Economics survey.

Tags CaaS, cloud, containers, platforms

Languages

JavaScript remains the Queen of Programming Languages

Post author By Stijn Schuermans
Post date June 27, 2019
No Comments on JavaScript remains the Queen of Programming Languages

Welcome to another update on programming languages communities. The choice of programming language matters deeply to developers because they want to keep their skills up to date and marketable. Languages are a beloved subject of debate and the kernels of some of the strongest developer communities. They matter to toolmakers too, as they want to make sure they provide the most useful SDΚs.

The estimates we present here look at active software developers using each programming language, across the globe and across all kinds of programmers. They are based on two pieces of data. First, our independent estimate of the global number of software developers, which we published for the first time in 2017. Second, our large-scale, low-bias surveys which reach more than 20,000 developers every six months. In the survey, we consistently ask developers about their use of programming languages across nine areas of development1, giving us rich and reliable information about who uses each language and in which context.

JavaScript is and remains the queen of programming languages. Its community of 11.7M developers is the largest of all languages. In 2018, 2.5M developers joined the community: the highest growth in absolute numbers and more than the entire population of Swift, Ruby, or Kotlin developers, amongst others. New developers see it as an attractive entry-level language, but also existing developers are adding it to their skillset. Even in software sectors where Javascript is least popular like machine learning or on-device code in IoT, over a quarter of developers use it for their projects.

Python has reached 8.2M active developers and has now surpassed Java in terms of popularity. It is the second-fastest growing language community in absolute terms with 2.2M net new Python developers in 2018. The rise of machine learning is a clear factor in its popularity. A whopping 69% of machine learning developers and data scientists now use Python (compared to 24% of them using R).

Java (7.6M active developers), C# (6.7M), and C/C++ (6.3M) are fairly close together in terms of community size and are certainly well-established languages. However, all three are now growing at a slower rate than the general developer population. While they are not exactly stagnating, they are no longer the first languages that (new) developers look to.

Java is very popular in the mobile ecosystem and its offshoots (Android), but not for IoT devices. C# is a core part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Throughout our research, we see a consistent correlation between the use of C# and the use of Microsoft developer products. It’s no surprise to see desktop and AR/VR (Hololens) as areas where C# is popular. C/C++ is a core language family for game engines and in IoT, where performance and low-level access matter (AR/VR exists on the boundary between games and IoT).

PHP is now the second most popular language for web development and the fifth most popular language overall, with 5.9M developers. Like Python, it’s growing significantly faster than the overall developer population, having added 32% more developers to its ranks in 2018. Despite having (arguably) a somewhat bad reputation, the fact that PHP is easy to learn and widely deployed still propels it forward as a major language for the modern Internet.

The fastest growing language community in percentage terms is Kotlin. It grew by 58% in 2018 from 1.1M to 1.7M developers. Since Google has made Kotlin a first-class language for Android development, we can expect this growth to continue, in a similar way to how Swift overtook Objective-C for iOS development.

Other niche languages don’t seem to be adding many developers, if any. Swift and Objective-C are important languages to the Apple community, but are stable in terms of the number of developers that use them. Ruby and Lua are not growing their communities quickly either.

Older and more popular programming languages have vocal critics, while new, exciting languages often have enthusiastic supporters. This data would suggest that it’s not easy for new languages to grow beyond their niche and become the next big thing. What does this mean for the future of these languages and others like Go or Scala? We will certainly keep tracking this evolution and plan to keep you informed.

The Developer Economics survey is now Live.
Have your say in which should be the next programming language Queen and you may win amazing prizes and gear. Discover more.

Want more developer insights on programming languages?

The State of Developer Nation report is free to download.

Tags javascript, languages, programming languages, python, ruby