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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.
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Awesome.
Trolling is a art,
I'm guessing the majority of the applications written to target Linux are server applications. It would be interesting to see if this can be explained by a result only in the server application space, or if more client applications are also being targeted at Linux. Of course, in order to find that out, one would probably have to pay to view the full report.
I know more "indy" developers that code irrespective of the platform. Programming is just different these days - what took an entire staff can now be done efficiently with just a few. Is the market downsizing or has growth in the field shrank or is it more platform agnostic? How do you determine a windows coder vs a universal or only a linux/unix coder?
Windows has some of the best tools out there - software as a whole has matured to a level that there hasn't been anything "new" and its been mostly upgrades. No wonder the market has shifted. Just because there are more developers in other environments, doesn't mean the market has dried up, just that it has matured.
What we're seeing here folks is a diversifying technological ecosystem. Windows does not "fit all", and neither does Linux. (Though arguably, Linux does fit lots more than Windows does)
Linux will never replace Windows, because nothing else ever will. Windows is an artifact of a time when having a single platform was more important for development than having the best platform. Now that the industry is maturing, the needs are rapidly becoming commodities behind standards-based interfaces (TCP, XML, etc) while the platform itself is becoming less and less relevant. The Internet met a need that Microsoft simply couldn't provide, and now the cat is out of the bag. Vista is Microsoft's attempt to lock users in before erosion gets too bad, and it's pretty evident how well that's going.
Windows' market share will slowly erode, slowly being beaten by an increasing number of products, services, and wares on an increasing number of platforms.
Go standards!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Embedded Linux is growing like chuff, and has been for some time. Around 3/4 of Linux jobs on my preferred job site are now for embedded, and for damn good money aswell!
/.] point, let people hack around with source and they'll do amazing things. Keep it all locked up in a nice blue box and what do you get? A bunch of crap smartphones which aren't clever. Meh.
Surely that's the [regularly stated on
Was it the same 400 developers surveyed? A 12% increase in Linux could mean more Linux developers or it could just mean less Windows developers. If I carefully pick my 400 to survey I could post a completely legit survey showing that OS2 is making a comeback. I hate survey's like this, unless the sampling pool is static is means absolutely nothing.
Javascript? Thats just one step up from HTML as far as "development" goes, of course it has 3 times the users, unlike Perl, Ruby and Python all you need is 24 hours and a dummies book.
Windows is satrated with third party apps. Anything you do for windows will most likely compete with someone elses program and you will have an uphill battle to get adoption. Linux there is a huge gap of programs that it needs allowing programmers a better chance to get a good foothold as a key app. Or the more ambition the next killer app. Making software for windows will either be medocre at best (In terms of sales) or if it is a really good app Microsoft will make a clone of it and imbed it into windows so you don't have a chance of competing, or discredited for some other application. Linux apps have a better chance of getting some staying power and your new app may get some ground.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I assume that by "nontraditional client devices" they mean embedded platforms. If so, then this really isn't surprising, or even really all that noteworthy at all.
There continues to be a vast increase in the number of embedded chips capable of running a full-fledged OS (like Linux) and as the chips get smaller, the of course get put into more things. Not only does Windows CE not support a lot of these chips, but even if it did no one in their right mind would use windows for something that didn't need a GUI. The only time to even consider using WinCE is in a PDA like-device, and thats a very small percentage of the embedded market.
By day, I code in WTL, Win32API and (regrettably) MFC. Like a great many, I wonder whether .net is pushing developers away from Windows.
This mess is drawing Microsoft's attention away from the C/C++ layer, where it's sorely needed, and into what, as far as I'm concerned, is comparable to Visual Basic. Put simply, neither my employer nor I are interested in writing in a proprietary, bytecode-interpreted language. If we have to abandon our C/C++ investment, it certainly wont be for a proprietary java knockoff. It will be for the real thing, allowing us to slowly drift away from Windows.
It's the target platform that matters in my view, if they took this into account I'm sure that linux would be a lot higher, because it would count all of the Web 2.0 people who are hosting on Linux but write in windows.
The way Microsoft ended Vb6 with no easy upgrade path to .net both irritated developers here and stranded some of them in vb6 with no path to .net. Some of them trained to java (tho they would have preferred .net).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
ubiquitous, even on mobile[linux] devices. As a Java Application Architect I care very little about what my infrastructure is, so long as it's not WebSphere. Mobile linux and Netbeans work _very_ nicely together. I can even whisper sweet nothings to Active Directory with my LDAP powers.
Give me the Toaster-based BSD and a jre higher than 1.4.2 and get out of my way!
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For mainstream and corporate software, Windows may continue to rule, but the biggest leaps I've seen in development have been in the niches where Linux has prominence. Audio, networking, manufacturing and server-side work is booming for Linux.
In a perfect world, this article would distinguish between development "for pay" and all development.
technical writing / development
Developers! Developers! Developers! De-- hey where'd everybody go?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Really not that surprising, since every other device runs on embedded linux. Everything from handheld GPS devices, electronic locks, routers, switches to satellite receivers/decoders runs on embedded linux now. It's cheapest embedded platform.
Meanwhile, the entire POSIX spec, suitable for fully implementing a POSIX system including the utility apps, with commentary and rationales for design decisions, fits in about two and a half feet of binders.
Intellisense is practically mandated if you want to work with an interface as baroque as Win32. And it's nice even when you're working with your own defined classes and structures. But it has its own drawbacks, as Petzold notes:
I develop for many platforms at work. It's a core part of my job. I mostly enjoy writing code for Unixish platforms, and tolerate the Windows stuff. The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them.
I've rarely felt the need for more debugging support than Linux comes with. The problems tend to be simpler and more easily uncovered. Eclipse is nice, and appears to take many of the good things about Visual Studio and leave much of the bad behind. For some projects, it's very useful. For others, it's overkill.
Another item worth reading - the whole book, really - is The Art Of Unix Programming. For a Windows developer's perspective on the book, see here. Needless to say, I don't agree with everything he writes there, but you might find it interesting.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
11.8 - 8.8 = 3.0
.34
percentage of developers on Linux now - percentage of developers on Linux a year ago = percentage of developers who switched to Linux
3.0 / 8.8 =
percentage of developers who switched to Linux / percentage of developers on Linux a year ago = percentage of Linux developers who switched in the last year
So, the number of Linux developers increased by 34% in the last year.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
TFA seems to be saying that there is a smaller *percentage* of people working on Windows as compared to other things:
"Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 percent in 2006."
That does *not* automatically mean that the number has declined. There may still be the same number of or more Windows developers, but their percentage is smaller because the other categories have increased.
I hate misleading article titles. The numbers should be thought of as multiple line graphs, not a pie chart.
If I am going to spend the time and effort to write a piece of commercial software, then I am probably going to want to make money off of it. Linux users in general don't like to pay for applications so there would be no way I would write a client application for Linux. Windows Administrators are leery of server applications without an installed user base, so I would tend to avoid writing server applications for the Windows platform (as a start-up mind you).
...because guess what, neither of them are going away in the near future so you might as well be proficient at both.
That being said, why limit myself to one platform? It would only be a smart business decision to code for both. Hey, what do you know...I work for a company that currently does that. It's like Windows users that refuse to use Linux "because it's too complicated", or *nix users who refuse to use Windows "because of (monopoly/commercialism/shady business practices/insert random slashdot whine here)".
If you limit your target, you only limit your market and earnings potential. That's just stupid from a business perspective.
I still like how people think that C is a platform-dependent language.
I write stuff in C/C++ using OpenGL and it compiles and runs consistently on Windows, OSX, and Linux. I don't need any interpreters (Python) or fancy toolkits or anything.
Platform independence is not a language issue, it's a library / API issue. If you use Win32 or .Net, you're stuck Windows (excepting Mono). If you use Cocoa, MacOSX. I suppose the equivalent on Linux would be glibc or one of the GUI toolkits. You could probably even classify Python as an API if you looked at it in a certain way.
The standard C library is probably about as standard an API as you'll get, along with Python, Java, etc. Now, yes, I realize that some implementations are a bit goofy (or just plain wrong), but if you stick with the functions that have been around for 30 years, it's hard to be bitten.
(Note: Also, stop using undefined features of languages, like "i = i++;"!)
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
FTA: "The arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse." I think that Vista actually hurt the numbers. Not so much Vista itself, but in Microsoft's post-launch execution. Microsoft's big developer hotness is supposed to be all these great .NET technologies. But the lack of Vista adoption might be putting the brakes on developer enthusiasm because Microsoft is failing to lead the way in showing the end result benefits of it.
COM didn't really catch on until Microsoft started demonstrating how hot it was through dogfooding and releasing applications architected on it. With it came a greater degree of modularity and flexibility that they demonstrated compellingly well with IE, Office, Visual Studio, etc.
To this day, Microsoft hasn't delivered any real WPF+WCF applications - at least none that a significant number of people care about. They should be pumping out amazing applications that can be showcased on Vista, causing developers to envy and copy them, and causing customers to actually want Vista because of the hotness the developers *and* Microsoft are offering.
Because most of the Windows defectors I know have gone to OSX.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
But not surprised. In the last few years Microsoft has increasingly taken a "My way" or the "High way" approach to software development. Like many others I work as a full-time software developer for many years now and these day's building a working solution is the easy part. The hard part is to make sure it runs at a customers site. The very thing Operating systems are supposed to enable.
The hack and slash security patches Microsoft brings out these days often unexpectedly denies features in the API on which solutions are based thus rendering large chunks of our code useless and a workaround must be found.
Security is important in a connected world and indeed not recognised enough my many programmers but the hap hazard ducks and dives in Windows makes it hard to tackle this issue in a structured way. Often I find myself hacking my way around "Security patches" in order to restore functionality in our software.
Add to that this crazy program (I refuse to call it an operating system) called Vista which is is so secure you hardly can run anything on it. I imagine the next version of Windows is 100% secure as it will only run "Notepad" and "Calculator"
So, bottom line. If the Operating System no longer allows us to use the hardware to drive our programs then the OS get's in the way. For me the problem is that I have a huge skill base in Windows and my programming tools that I don't like to give up. But for some of my projects I seriously consider to try my hand at Linux so I can provide a turnkey solution (Include the OS with the software).
MS Windows has become like a government. It is supposed to serve but instead it now insists to rule the IT world.
What's the point of polling North American developers?
The 11% decrease in Windows targeting could be because one of the 9 still working here switched to Linux.
It might be but with a sample of "400 developers and IT managers in North America"
there is just far to small of a sample that the margin of error is probably well over 20%
Also where and how where these "developers and IT managers" sampled.
At a Microsoft Developers conference?
Most Linux developers I know are broke and living on almost nothing but air. Many are student, very green (save the environment) or have some other oddness like being idealistic or so focused on Cool stuff they forget that they need to have an income.
Odds are that these guys did not get surveyed.
With only such a small sample, I don't give much weight to the results.
Also it take about 10 Windows developers to get the same work accomplished as one Linux developer.
Most windows development is dealing with Bugs, Features, bad documentation and changes from Microsoft rather then with real forward progress.
I'd love to know what they think developers are moving over too? Cross platform stuff like Ajax, TCL, PHP and Java? Cross platform C++ and C? Much of the application layer stuff I work on tends to be platform Agnostic like that. The rest is Kernel and Drivers that are every OS specific, although I even did 2 drivers that were windows and Linux cross platform. It even worked to my own amazement.
John
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
A whole article on statistics, yet no where does it say what is the confidence level. Is the percent error +/- 10% ? If so, then this is a bogus story. Since it doesn't bother to even say, then this reporting is rubbish. Where's your love for mathematics, Slashdot editors?