Windows Loses Ground With Developers

An anonymous reader notes that InfoWorld is covering a survey of North American developers that claims that Linux is gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows fell 11 percent over the last year. Evans Data has been conducting these surveys of client, server, and Web developers since 1998. Evans Data says that the arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. The big gainer wasn't developing for a Web platform, but rather for Linux and "nontraditional client devices." Windows is still dominant, with 65% of developers writing code for this platform. Linux stands at almost 12%, up from 8% a year earlier. The article says that Evans Data collected information on Mac and Unix development but did not include them in this year's report.

Comments

Re:Nice but worthless data

[swillden]

If I carefully pick my 400 to survey I could post a completely legit survey

If you carefully pick your 400, your survey isn't legit.

Re:Linux is not another Windows

[quanticle]

We are far more productive just sticking to one set of code for one platform, because there are no good languages out there that work for any platform.

Excuse me for being naive, but why not Java? Its not like Java carries any performance penalty as compared to C# - both are JIT compiled languages that are run by a VM. Java has excellent developer tools as well: both Eclipse and Netbeans have matured as IDEs.