Tag: Kotlin

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Analysis

Infographic: Programming languages adoption trends 2021

Infographic: Programming Language adoption trends 2021

In our last infographic, JavaScript was the most popular programming language. What has changed in terms of the sizes in the last six months? You can find the answers in this infographic with key findings from our Developer Economics 20th edition survey, which ran between November 2020 and February 2021 and reached 19,000 developers worldwide.

Javascript is the queen of programming languages

JavaScript is the most popular programming language by some distance, with nearly 14M developers using it globally. More importantly, the JavaScript community has been growing in size consistently for the past three years. Between Q4 2017 and Q1 2021, more than 4.5M developers joined the community – the highest growth in absolute terms across all languages. Even in software sectors where JavaScript is not among developers’ top choices, like data science or embedded development, about a fourth of developers use it in their projects.

Python is conquering the world

Since it surpassed Java in popularity at the beginning of 2020, Python has remained the second most widely adopted language behind JavaScript. Python now counts just over 10M users, after adding 1.6M net new developers in the past year alone. That’s a 20% growth rate, the highest across all the large programming language communities of more than 6M users. The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python’s popularity. Close to 70% of ML developers and data scientists report using Python. For perspective, only 17% use R, the other language often associated with data science.

Kotlin’s rise continues

The fastest growing language community in percentage terms is Kotlin. In fact, it’s one of the two communities – the other being Rust – that has grown more than two-fold over the last three years, from 1.1M developers in Q4 2017 to 2.6M in Q1 2021. This is also very

evident from Kotlin’s ranking, where it moved from 11th to eight place during that period – a trend that’s largely attributed to Google’s decision to make Kotlin its preferred language for Android development. Even so, Kotlin still has a long way to go to catch up with the leading language in mobile development, Java; there are currently twice as many mobile developers building applications in Java than in Kotlin.

Swift was recently outranked by Kotlin, after attracting slightly fewer net new developers in the second half of 2020 (100K vs 300K). Even so, Swift is currently the default language for development across all Apple platforms, which has led to a stagnation in the adoption of Objective C. This gradual phase-out of Objective C from the Apple app ecosystem is also matched by a significant drop in its rank, from ninth to 12th place. 

The more niche languages – Go, Ruby, Rust, and Lua – are still much smaller, with up to 2.1M active software developers each. Go and Ruby are important languages in backend development, but Go has grown slightly faster in the past year, both in absolute and percentage terms. Rust has formed a very strong community of developers who care about performance, memory safety, and security. As a result, it grew faster than any other language in the last 12 months, more than doubling in size. Finally, Lua was also among the fastest growing language communities in the last year, mainly attracting AR/VR and IoT developers looking for a scripting alternative to low-level languages such as C and C++.

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Infographic: Programming languages adoption trends 2021
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Languages

Infographic: Programming languages adoption trends 2020

What do developers value in open source?

Languages are a beloved subject of debate and the kernels of some of the strongest developer communities. The choice of programming language matters deeply to developers because they want to keep their skills up to date and marketable. They matter to toolmakers too, because they want to make sure they provide the most useful SDKs. So which programming languages had notable changes in adoption trends in the last 3 years? Find the answers in our infographic with key findings from our Developer Economics 19th edition survey, which ran in June-August 2020 and reached 17,000 developers in 159 countries. 

JavaScript is the most popular programming language

As of Q3 2020, 12.4M developers globally were using JavaScript. We also estimate that in mid-2020 there were 21.3M active software developers in the world. So, 58% of all developers use JavaScript. Notably, the JavaScript community has been growing in size consistently for the past three years. Between Q2 2017 and Q3 2020, nearly 5M developers joined the community – by far the highest growth in absolute terms across all languages. Even in software sectors where JavaScript is least popular, like data science or AR/VR, over a fifth of developers use it in their projects. 

It’s a good idea to learn Python

For the second half-year period in a row, Python is the most widely adopted language behind JavaScript. Python now counts 9M users, after adding 2.2M net new developers in the past year alone, outranking Java at the beginning of 2020. The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in its popularity. An impressive 77% of ML developers and data scientists currently use Python. For perspective, only 22% use R, the other language often associated with data science.

What’s new with Java and other well- established programming languages?

Java, with over 8M active users worldwide, is the cornerstone of the mobile app ecosystem – Android – as well as one of the most important general-purpose languages. It’s adoption may have remained stable in the past six months but, in the overall picture, the Java community has gained 1.6M developers since mid-2017, which corresponds to a 24% growth.

The group of major, well-established languages is completed with C/C++ (6.3M), PHP (6.1M) and C# (6M). The fact that C# lost three places in the ranking of language communities during the last three years is mostly explained by its slower growth compared to C/C++ and PHP. C and C++ remain core languages in IoT projects (for both on-device and application-level coding), whereas PHP is still the second most commonly used language in web applications, after JavaScript. On the other hand, C# may be sustaining its dominance in the game and AR/VR developer ecosystems, but it seems to be losing its edge in desktop development – possibly due to the emergence of cross-platform tools based on web technologies.

Android developers behind Kotlin growth

Kotlin is one of the fastest growing language communities, having increased more than two-fold in size since the end of 2017, from 1.1M in Q4 2017 to 2.3M in Q3 2020. This is also very evident from Kotlin’s ranking, where it moved from 11th to ninth place during that period – a trend that’s largely attributed to Google’s decision to make Kotlin its preferred language for Android development. 

Swift surpassed Kotlin in popularity this year, after attracting slightly more net new developers in the first half of 2020 (400k vs 300k). Since Swift became the default language for development across all Apple platforms, the adoption of Objective C has been decreasing steadily. This phase-out from the Apple app ecosystem is also matched by a significant drop in the rank of Objective C, from ninth to 12th place. 

Finally, the more niche languages – Go, Ruby, Rust, and Lua – are still much smaller, with up to 1.5M active software developers each. Ruby and Lua have been around for more than two decades now, but their communities have essentially stopped growing in the last three years. On the contrary, Go and Rust appear to be actively adding developers, although it is still unclear whether the two languages will climb the programming language ranking in the coming period.

What’s your favourite programming language? Take our Developer Economics 20th edition survey to support your choice!

Infographic: Programming languages adoption trends 2020
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Community Platforms

Decoding development trends: The 17th State of the Developer Nation Report is out

Decoding development trends: The 17th State of the Developer Nation Report is out

Every six months, the Developer Economics Survey captures the voice of more than 20,000 developers globally. Our surveys engage developers working across mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, game, AR/VR, machine learning development and data science, decoding development trends.

The 17th Developer Economics survey ran between June and  August 2019. The data analysed provided really interesting insights about the different developer profiles out there.

For instance, one in three developers are all-rounders. Only one in five declare themselves as specialists. There are almost four times as many introverts (37%) as extroverts (10%) among developers. This is a significant difference from the 2:1 ratio in favour of extroverts found in the wider community.

We also included several unusual labels, uncovering, for example, that there are double the number of night owl developers than early birds (29% compared to 14%).. What time is it with you right now?

2X night owl developers compared to early birds (29% compared to 14%

Javascript remains the Queen

Looking, into programming language trends we found that JavaScript remains the queen with a community of over 11M active developers. On the second tier we have Java (6.9M) and Python (6.8M).

Our data challenges the assumption that developers’ language use is relatively stable over time. Instead, it seems that developers drop and adopt new languages all the time, depending on their needs and on their running projects.

Kotlin is the rising star among programming languages. It moved up from 11th to 8th place in just a year.

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Growing interest and adoption in 5 emerging technologies

We saw a significant increase in developers’ involvement and adoption of five technologies in the 6 month period ending Q2 2019. These are DevOps, mini-apps, computer vision, cryptocurrencies, and fog/edge computing. For DevOps in particular, the percentage of developers who are either interested in it, learning about it, or have already adopted it increased from 66% to 70%.

Computer vision, on the other hand, saw a noticeable growth in the number of developers involved in it.  Meanwhile, the share of those developers who are actually adopting it increased only slightly.

Interest in robotics and quantum computing also increased.

However, the share of interested developers that are working on the technology dropped.

ŸInterest and adoption in blockchain applications other than cryptocurrency, conversational platforms/voice search, drones and biometric technologies remains constant.
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Streaming games and extending reality

ŸJust 16% of professional and 10% of hobbyist game developers say they are actively working on designing games for streamers to live-stream their gameplay to an audience. Gameplay streaming is mostly associated with brand promotion and revenue generation. Therefore, the difference between professional and hobbyist interest is to be expected.

One in five AR/VR game developers design for gameplay streaming. This might be because they are the most comfortable with different models for their games, on emerging hardware and across new business channels.

Decoding development trends across regions and screens

  • 2 out of 5 app developers in Asia build apps for messaging platforms and/or chatbots.
  • 34% of mobile developers used cross-platform frameworks in the last 12 months (40% of professional mobile developers, 33% of hobbyists and students).
  • Almost one in four mobile developers opt to use React Native.
  • 31% of mobile developers whose primary target is iOS are using React Native. This compares with 21% of those who primarily target Android.

You can read the full State of the Developer Nation report here.

We look forward to decoding development trends in our next report. You can help shape the trends by taking the 18th Developer Economics survey here!

Categories
Languages

The Queen of Programming Languages with 11M+ Users

Programming Languages
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
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
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.