Tag: programming languages

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Languages

JavaScript remains the Queen of Programming Languages

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.

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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. 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.

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Business

Infographic: What are developers up to in the State of the Developer Nation 15th Edition?

State of the Developer Nation 15 edition

Did you get a free copy of our latest State of the Developer Nation 15 edition? If you haven’t yet, you should! It highlights the most interesting findings from our Developer Economics survey which ran this summer in May-June this and reached over 20,500+ devs in 167 countries.

What’s new in the State of the Developer Nation 15 edition?


We asked developers, among other things, what kind of skills they’d like to learn or improve in 2019. We compared developer interest in twelve different skill sets, spanning from data science and machine learning to business/marketing skills to cloud-native development, DevOps, and hardware-level coding. The results were somewhat surprising. Data science and machine learning will be the most highly sought after skills in the next year – 45% of developers want to gain expertise in these fields. 33% of developers want to learn UI design, 25% cloud-native development. Other common tech skills, such as learning a new programming language, rank lower.

When it comes to programming language communities, JavaScript still reigns as the most popular language, with over 10M users globally. Python has reached 7M active developers and is climbing up the ranks.  62% of machine learning developers and data scientists now use Python.

Big data has been hyped for several years. In addition, a race has begun to design processors capable of crunching large sets of often unstructured data and to produce real-time predictions. The question is, to how many in the rapidly growing Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) community are large datasets and real-time predictions relevant? Scroll down to find all the highlights in the infographic!

Don’t forget to share the infographic & download the full report!

The Developer Economics 17th Edition is now LIVE. Take the survey and shape tomorrow’s trends.

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Liked it? Take the survey and share with us your ideas for the future of development.

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Business

Infographic: Developers are dreaming of a smarter tomorrow

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As most of you know, we recently published our brand new State of the Developer Nation report 14th edition. Findings are based on the insights from our Developer Economics survey which ran in Q4 2017. The survey reached over 21,700 developers in 169 countries, asking them to share their experiences with tools, platforms, developer communities, resources, and emerging tech.

What’s new in the State of the Developer Nation 14th edition?

For the first time, the State of the Developer Nation report presents the estimate for the number of active software developers using JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, Swift and other major programming languages, across the globe and across all kinds of programmers. We revealed that JavaScript is the most popular programming language, used by close to 10M developers, followed by Java (7.3M active developers), C# (6.3M), and C/C++ (5.7M). Python has reached 6.3M active developers and is climbing up the ranks, recently surpassing C# in popularity. The rise of machine learning is a factor in its popularity. 

In this edition, we also reveal which emerging tech will have the most impact in the next 5 years, what lies in the future of serverless platforms, and which is the most promising AR/VR hardware among developers.

Check out our infographic which highlights the key findings from the report and don’t forget to share it!

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Languages Tools

The Rise of Mobile C#

mobile c#

Microsoft have been struggling to get traction with their mobile computing efforts, with Windows Phone stuck at around 3% share of the smartphone market. Windows 8 is doing a little better in the tablet market but is still a distant third to iOS and Android. Despite losing in the platform wars, Microsoft’s developer ecosystem is still strong and they’re not showing much sign of wanting to give up their tools. The latest Developer Economics survey showed that 38% of mobile developers were using C# for some of their work and 16% use it as their main language. Those developers are not all focused on Microsoft platforms by a long way. They’re not all building games with Unity either. So what are they doing?

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Not just Windows Phone, particularly not for pros

Whilst 30% of all developers in the survey were targeting Windows Phone, that doesn’t quite account for the majority of those whose main language is C#. Also, more than half of the developers targeting Windows Phone are Hobbyists and Explorers[bctt tweet=”more than half of the developers targeting Windows Phone are Hobbyists and Explorers” username=”DevEconomics”] – i.e. those not working on mobile apps full time. If we focus on full time professional mobile developers, as we will for the rest of this article, then just 50% of those that use C# as their main language are primarily targeting Microsoft platforms. Apple’s iOS (with 23% of developers) and Google’s Android (14%) are in fact more popular targets than Windows 8 (10%). So, how do developers use C# on other platforms? With cross-platform tools, particularly Unity and Xamarin.

More enterprise apps than games

Unity is by far the most popular engine for mobile games, in fact in the Q3 2014 Developer Economics survey a massive 47% of game developers were using it for some of their projects. C# is the most important language in the Unity developer ecosystem, although there are two other languages supported (UnityScript – a JavaScript variant with type annotations – and Boo – a statically typed language with Python-like syntax). However, a lot of developers are using Unity to build games in their spare time. When we look at the full time pros we find that games are only the 4th most popular category of app. The top 3 categories are Business & Productivity tools, Enterprise-specific apps and Utilities, all staples of the enterprise-focused app developer. Developers are either building these apps for Microsoft platforms, using Xamarin to reach iOS and Android with them, or both. Indeed it’s the combination of a familiar language (and code portability) and tooling for many enterprise app developers with the cross-platform reach they can get with Xamarin that’s making C# such a popular choice in this area.

A flexible cross-platform approach

A lot of popular cross-platform tools for mobile development only support iOS and Android. As such, for those also wanting support for Windows Phone and possibly desktop Windows and Mac too, Xamarin is one of very few serious options. That said, it’s not just a default choice. Using Xamarin.Forms, developers can get the write-once-run-anywhere efficiency that drives many decisions to use a cross-platform approach. The downside to this approach is that it can give a lowest common denominator of functionality; not allowing developers to really optimise for the unique features of each platform. However, Xamarin also directly wraps the native platform APIs, allowing developers to call anything in the native SDKs. They can even automatically create bindings for popular third party libraries on each platform. The other key reason developers often go with a native rather than cross-platform approach is performance. However, a recent independent performance test (by an early Google engineer) showed Xamarin’s compiler produces raw performance that’s comparable to native on iOS and Android. Raw performance isn’t the only thing that counts of course – a garbage collection pause causing a stutter in your animation is jarring, however fast the the code is executing otherwise. Enterprises customers will usually put up with mild inconveniences of that nature to get the cost savings and maintenance benefits of a single code base across platforms though.

Better revenues

Possibly the best measure of the success of C# on mobile devices is the revenues of the developers using it. Whether you believe the same level of smoothness in the user experience can be achieved or not, it only matters if it costs users and revenue. Here there is no room for debate. The revenues of full time professional developers whose main language is C# are comparable to, or better than, those of other developers targeting the same primary platform with the native language. For example, the revenue distribution for C# developers on iOS is extremely similar to that for Objective-C developers and the average revenues are higher. This is both because there are more C# developers earning more than $10K (46% vs 36%) per month and while there are slightly fewer earning more than $100K per month (16% vs 17%), a significantly greater fraction of those using C# earn more than $500K per month (14% vs 6%).

This is not to suggest that C# is somehow a better language for targeting iOS than Objective-C. This is correlation and not causation. The cause of the better revenues is that the C# developers are much more likely to be targeting enterprises than the Objective-C developers and that’s where the higher revenues are most likely to be found. There’s an enormous pool of developers trained in C# and related Microsoft technologies. A lot of them are working on desktop enterprise apps or the server side. As it becomes increasingly clear that C# is a viable language for successfully delivering cross-platform mobile solutions, C#’s rise on mobile looks set to continue for several years yet.

The Rise of the Mobile C#

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