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Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats

Posted by Soulskill on from the nobody-loves-matlab dept.

SternisheFan points out the results from 26,086 developers who answered Stack Overflow's annual survey. It includes demographic data, technology preferences, occupational information, and more. Some examples: The U.S. had the most respondents, followed by India and the UK, while small countries and several Nordic ones had the most developers per capita. The average age of developers in the U.S. and UK was over 30, while it was 25 in India and 26.6 in Russia. 92.1% of developers identified as male. Almost half of respondents did not receive a degree in computer science.

The most-used technologies included JavaScript, SQL, Java, C#, and PHP. The most loved technologies were Swift, C++11, and Rust, while the most dreaded were Salesforce, Visual Basic, and Wordpress. 20.5% of respondents run Linux more than other OSes, and 21.5% rely on Mac OS X. Vim is almost 4 times more popular than Emacs, and both are used significantly less than NotePad++ and Sublime Text.

45% of respondents prefer tabs, while 33.6% prefer spaces, though the relationship flips at higher experience levels. On average, developers who work remotely earn more than developers who don't. Product managers reported the lowest levels of job satisfaction and the highest levels of caffeinated beverages consumed per day.

3 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Tabs vs Spaces by Afty0r · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a fairly experienced and slightly wrinkly and grey developer, can anyone tell me why spaces over tabs?

    Tabs allow the developer to customise their IDE to display the amount of indentation they desire... and use fewer bytes... spaces seem to have no benefits whatsoever in my book.

    1. Re:Tabs vs Spaces by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As a fairly experienced and slightly wrinkly and grey developer, can anyone tell me why spaces over tabs?

      Tabs allow the developer to customise their IDE to display the amount of indentation they desire... and use fewer bytes... spaces seem to have no benefits whatsoever in my book.

      Different editors display tabs differently.

      Some editors replace tabs with N spaces.

      Mix the two, and indentation gets all fucked up.

      You work for me, you will use spaces.

    2. Re:Tabs vs Spaces by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It does actually affect the team. Everyone needs to use the exact same tab settings or else the code looks different. It's utterly painful to view some code where someone is tab-happy and assumes one tab stop is two characters and then uses deeply indented conditionals: your teammates should never be forced maximize the size of a window just to view your code. Especially if you change tabs settings within a single file (and I swear that idiots actually do this). Not all developers use the same editor, not all methods of viewing the code use the same tab settings either; paginators, printers, source code control, static analysis tools, and so forth, may all have different ideas about tabs than you used in your editor.

      Be nice to your teammates, because no one's personal style preferences are more important than getting along as a team and getting stuff done.