Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats

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.

Comments

Tabs vs Spaces

[Afty0r]

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.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? If you edit code on unix tabs are a nightmare.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Kohath]

Spaces are 1 space. Tabs are a random number of spaces.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[AuMatar]

Tabs were more likely to cause problems in the old days, when editors did things that were ridiculous like expand them to 8 spaces. Nowdays with everything configurable, it isn't much of an issue. The reason why the older more experienced people prefer spaces is that they learned to dislike tabs in the bad old days. In 10 years that argument will be dead with tabs winning.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Anonymous Coward]

well i don't work for you, and i know how to configure editors to keep tabs as tabs. so i guess i win on two counts.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[crgrace]

If you use Python tabs can still cause you a lot of grief. In 2015.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[monkeyzoo]

i think you missed the point.
you can customize the *display* of tabs.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Jeremi]

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

Because in every project that uses tabs,
The code is inevitably
        littered with
        the occasional
  line that does not line up with the others
        for no apparent reason.
        and you will spend part of every day
        either changing your editor's tab settings
        to match the tab settings of the code's author
        or editing the code to "fix" the problem
        (which will of course "break" it for the
        next person whose tab settings don't match yours)

If you avoid tabs and use only spaces, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[AuMatar]

Yet another reason not to use Python. Guido made a major fuck up there- if he was going to use whitespace as syntax, he should have made the type and amount part of the language spec. Not doing so has wasted more developer time than any other language issue I've ever seen.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[swillden]

i think you missed the point. you can customize the *display* of tabs.

Which only matters if all indentation, including alignment, is done with tabs. The moment you throw in a few spaces to line something up on a non-tab boundary (say, to align a second line of arguments with the first argument), then you have a mess, unless your tab width is set to exactly the value that whoever touched the code before you set it to.

In addition, terminal windows still display tabs as eight characters and likely will forever... and even if your terminal allows you to configure tab size to something other than eight, it'll just break the formatted output of other tools that assume that tabs are properly-sized.

Experienced developers prefer tabs not because they got used to them in "the bad old days". We had configurable editors 20 years ago too, you know... in fact all programmer's editors could configure tab size 20 years ago, and we had young punks like you arguing exactly the same thing. Actually, to tell the truth, I was very much a "tabs not spaces" punk in the 90s. Back then we also had benchmarks to show that using tabs rather than spaces resulted in faster compile times, measurably so, at least on sufficiently-large codebases. WordPerfect's style guide insisted on tabs for this reason.

But... configurable editors don't solve the problem. And today, of course, tabs vs spaces is utterly irrelevant to compile times. Plus we now have Python to contend with.

You, too, will one day get so frustrated when dealing with impossible-to-read code due to tabs, possibly with formatting that assumes multiple different tab sizes within a single file, that you'll be enlightened and learn to love spaces.

Hopefully when that day comes you'll have a good, configurable programmer's editor that can not only automatically manage indentation with spaces, but even highlight or automatically replace leading tabs with spaces. I recommend EMACS, which thoroughly handled these issues 30+ years ago.

Now get off my lawn! Tabs are NOT welcome here.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[AuMatar]

You have to hit it once. That deletes the entire tab. Unless you have your editor set to do something weird, like turn tabs into spaces.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[msobkow]

Myself, I've learned to dislike Python rather than the tabs.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Once upon a time, tabs were wonderful. Because disks held 80 kilobytes and ANYTHING that could put more code/data on a disk was wonderful, as long as you had the RAM/CPU to deal with it.

Those days are long gone, however.

The nominal expansion of tabs is to advance to the next column which is a multiple of 8. That's presupposing "absolute" horizontal tabs, as opposed to the less-common relative horizontal tab (RHT).

But 8 columns is a really awkward amount to indent things, especially if you're dealing with letter-sized printouts at 10 characters per inch. A much more pleasant value is usually to tab in increments of 3 or 4 columns.

And, as others have pointed out, the 8-character convention is really just a convention. There's always someone who sets their hardware tabs or tab displays differently.

And then there's Python, which gets its magic from careful indentation. Meaning that a listing that looks fine on-screen or on paper may bewilderingly not run. Because although the alignment of the characters on successive lines may match up, the actual number of spacing characters on those lines might not. And conversely, the alignment can get scrambled just because someone picked a different tab expansion value.

And that is why it's the experienced people who are least fond of tab characters. Once burnt...

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Your.Master]

Spaces are unquestionably useful in some cases. Tabs need to justify their existence.

I can virtually guarantee if you were inventing the first character set today, with no backward-compatibility constraints and no knowledge of the real world's history of keyboarding, you would not include a tab key. It's a relic of the typewriter era, and it's redundant. You *would* probably have a "change the currently focussed element" key, but I suspect it would be related to the arrow keys and would be positional rather than linear. Word processors would have a different affordance for "indent bulleted list".

Disk space for source code tabs vs. spaces is irrelevant.

To me, the tab character causes problems and the only real problem it solves (different tastes for how much width to indent) are better solved by an IDE which is already solving the same problem in so many other contexts, like syntax highlighting in different colours etc.. An IDE could easily say that a line that starts with a string of X consecutive spaces should be represented as Y consecutive spaces. Y may even be a fraction, or a function if you choose to have tab mean "align to previous", but 2, 4, and 8 fixed-width spaces are pretty common. Personally I like 3, but at my workplace the standard is 4 and that's just fine.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[alexhs]

I guess that there are multiple reasons.

The most common one is ignorance: most people don't know how tabs are supposed to be used as indentation and indentation ONLY, and how to set up an editor appropriately (and the shell, by the way) (see the other responses to your comment for proof).

The second is lazyness / non-confrontational behaviour: If you settle on tabs, you will have to educate all users about the correct usage, and have to bear with people that just insist on using tabs differently (see point 1). If you settle on space usage, that's about it.

The third reason is that some editors are stupid, because the implementation doesn't know that tabs are supposed to be used as indentation and indentation ONLY, and will (for example) insist on aligning multi-line arguments to a function just after the parenthesis using a liberal amount of tabs.

And then there are some language requirements that like to mess things up, like Makefile requiring tabs and other scripting languages pursuing a vendetta against tabs (like Python).

That being said, I will gladly educate people about tab usage, their ignorance is no excuse for using inferior solutions.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[corychristison]

I prefer tabs.

I don't understand the debate here. Use what you like. If you're editing someone else's code, then convert it to your preference or suck it up.

The editor I use will detect tabs or spaces in the file, and automatically convert it to the preference I set it to in the settings.

Why is this so hard? Why don't all editors do this?

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[DigiShaman]

Next time you interview someone, the first question out of your mouth should be "Tabs or spaces?!" This way, nobody's fucking time is wasted.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[xdaimon]

What is even easier is to use an editor who automatically writes a set of spaces when the tab key is hit. At this point say good bye to \t forever.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[Anonymous Coward]

You, too, will one day get so frustrated when dealing with impossible-to-read code due to tabs, possibly with formatting that assumes multiple different tab sizes within a single file, that you'll be enlightened and learn to love spaces.

I've been coding way too long to care about indentation bullshit anymore. If a file does not have uniform indentation style, reindent it with a standard tool (*), and then commit the reindent-only change to local git. You can discard the reindent commit if you don't end up making any real changes to the file; otherwise, your patch goes on top of the freshly-indented file.

* = Use your company's indentation guidelines if they exist; otherwise just use the style options that most-closely match the majority of the source tree. Also be aware that some coders in your company may need a refresher on how to tell a diff program how to ignore whitespace changes.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[beelsebob]

Because tabs are not enough to lay out code well (you always end up with a couple of spaces to align things correctly). Then once you introduce a mixture, you end up in a situation where a change in tab-width causes layout fuckup (i.e. you get fuck ups on a different user's system).

Meanwhile, if you use spaces for everything, code remains well laid out everywhere. If you have even a half-decent editor, it will allow you to edit spaces as if they were tabs, so using spaces has exactly 0 drawback.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[phantomfive]

Different programmers like different levels of indentation.

All of them can be made happy if you use tabs to the point of indentation, and then after that use spaces to further indent.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Dynedain]

The nominal expansion of tabs is to advance to the next column which is a multiple of 8.

Huh? Since when? On typwriters and early word-processors it was forced to 5 columns. And even most typewriters allowed you to move the tabstops to arbitrary places.

On every editor I've seen in the last 5 years the tab display width is configurable. If you like 2 spaces, great, if you like 8, have at it. It doesn't affect the rest of your team.

The only reason tab characters are a problem is because people mix and match tabs and spaces.

Python's whitespacing is an evil that should be purged with fire.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[psililisp]

I'm honestly curious: is there a style guide that says to use tabs? The ones I've looked at all recommend spaces.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[laffer1]

Funny, I feel the exact opposite. The FreeBSD style(9) documentation suggests tabs because they can be customized to individual developers needs and they minimize weird diffs on the version control systems.

I take language and platform into account. For HTML and JavaScript, I prefer spaces. For Java, Perl, C#, CSS, C, and C++ tabs. If there is a crazy IDE required, I often prefer spaces because many of them default to some level of spaces and I like the quick code cleanup command to work the same for the whole team.

The real issue with that question is that it's impossible to answer. Even if you get a "spaces" person, try to get them to agree on the number of spaces. A coworker loves 2 spaces which is flat out wrong to me. Too hard to read. I've met people into 3 or 4 spaces. Then you get into where to put curly braces, etc.

Whatever you choose, it should be a standard for code whether at an open source project or a company.

I can't stand everyone using their own style. It's much worse than having to use a specific one.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[Flammon]

This debate only happened because some programmers stopped thinking about the indentation abstraction. You shouldn't be thinking in terms of spaces vs tabs. Instead you should be thinking in levels of indentation for blocks. Indentation is not some technique to make your code look pretty, it's there to show a clear separation of logic, loops, blocks etc. Code is art, just not Ascii art. One keystroke per indentation is the simplest and most efficient.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[spongman]

tabs are an undefined constant number of spaces. not random.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[locofungus]

If you avoid spaces and use only tabs, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.

So how many tabs should you use here so that it lines up with the commands below?

cat *.c
cat -n *.c
grep int *.c

struct S {
[tab]int [tab][tab][tab][tab] x;[tab][tab]/* x coord */
[tab]int [tab][tab][tab][tab] y;[tab][tab]/* y coord */
[tab]unsigned long long [tab] hash; [tab] /* hash of object stored at x,y */
};

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Darinbob]

Spaces are superior, simple enough. The main reason is that spaces are always spaces. For a given font (fixed with only, none of this variable width crap), spaces are always the same width. Tabs however may count for 2, 3, 4, 8, or some random number of characters. There is *NO* standard for what a tab is supposed to be. Devs with no sense of style will ignore any existing tab settings in the file they are editing and instead use their own, and it is relatively common to find source code that can not even bother to stick to the same tab settings throughout. But spaces always work.

In a good IDE and edtior, a tab key will *always* indent the correct amount rather than inserting a single hard tab. An IDE that does not properly indent code is worthless. So there should never be any correlation between a tab key press and the number of spaces/tabs inserted into the code. If it doesn't work, then stop coding with notepad. Saving fewer bytes is irrelevant; it may have been useful when we were using teletypes, but that was back when people tried to comment their code as little as possible and use use 5 character function names.

And besides, tabs often screw up languages that are indentation sentitive, like Occam, Python, etc.

Note especially with the survey that with higher experience the devs preferred spaces are preferred over tabs while those with lesser experience preferred tabs over spaces. Experience is the voice in your head that says "ain't got enough time left being alive to waste it being stupid."

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Darinbob]

I find it hilarious that some programmers who use variables names like lpszNameOfFunctorFactoryBuilder will then turn around and use tabs to save a handful of bytes.

If code is to be properly commented then should take far far more kilobytes than a few extra spaces.

Even in the old days, people wasted characters though. Look at COBOL, wasting so much space on the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION and whatnot. I think the early Unix code stands out as being especially parsimonious about typing extra characters. Most things were somewhat in the middle between the extremes.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[lordlod]

Which only matters if all indentation, including alignment, is done with tabs. The moment you throw in a few spaces to line something up on a non-tab boundary (say, to align a second line of arguments with the first argument), then you have a mess, unless your tab width is set to exactly the value that whoever touched the code before you set it to.

And here is what you are doing wrong. Tabs are for indentation, spaces are for alignment.

If you are increasing the nesting depth, use one tab.
If you want to shift the start of a line over to align the arguments, use spaces.

Tabs are not X-spaces. Tabs are an abstract indentation level which can be represented as a number of space characters.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[Darinbob]

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.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[Darinbob]

If it is shared code, then ALWAYS suck it up. If you're in a team then ALWAYS abide by the team's coding standards even if you disagree with them.

An editor should never automatically convert the spaces/tabs in a file without you telling it to do so, that is just broken behavior. If your job is to add one line to a 10,000 line file, you should not convert it all and then check it into source code control. That is anti social and passive aggressive behavior.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[goose-incarnated]

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.

Because code that looks like this is more readable than code that looks like this. Sure you can spend extra effort to line up your code using tabs in a way that doesn't break on someone with a different tabstop, but why bother when spaces do it with no extra effort?

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[serviscope_minor]

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!!!

Seriously that's a guaranteed path to failure. If you stick to tabs only for indenting at the block level and spaces for any further alignment then it works perfectly. That way changing the tab stops only changes the block-level indent. Any further formatting is done with spaces.

Tabs are logically block-level so they should only be used for block level. If you're aligning relative to text, you need spaces because that's not a block level thing.

The rule is simple and if only everyone would find Jesus^W^Wlearn the rule then we would all achieve peace on earth^W^W^Whaving no commits which change all the whitespace.

/me bangs the pulpit.

PS: use vi.

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[beelsebob]

Alternatively, just configure your editor to insert spaces to the next tab stop when you push tab, and you're done.

Having a mixture of tabs and spaces always leads to people fucking up the formatting, because it's impossible to see when they've made a mistake until it lands on someone else's machine.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

[ranton]

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.

There are alternate plausible explanations for all those things other than the one that might first appear.

I think the most obvious explanation is that older programmers are more likely to remember older and less capable tools which couldn't handle tabs well. Today I cannot imagine why someone would use a tool that cannot customize tabs for each user. Mixing tabs and spaces is still a problem, but unless you are using a 20 year old editor why would you still be using spaces?

Re:Tabs vs Spaces

[jez9999]

So have a checkin hook that refuses to accept any checkins with lines that don't match /^([^\ ]\t*[^\t]*)|$/

Gender balance "problem"?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Software development has a gender balance problem. Our internal stats suggest the imbalance isn't quite as severe as the survey results would make it seem, but there's no doubt everyone who codes needs to be more proactive welcoming women into the field.

SJWs have spent decades telling women they need "special help" to become engineers and programmers. We can't overcome that by being "welcoming" because they chose a different path before college. Even without the SJW discouragement campaign, it's clear that women are choosing more rewarding fields that better fit their preferences. Staring at code all day isn't for everyone, just like working with babies all day would drive me mad. Different jobs for different folks, and we should all be glad for the variety.

Just stop telling me this is all my fault, StackOverflow.

Re:Stack Overflow?

[BarbaraHudson]

I read the stats
It's in plain view
If you're over 50
No job for YOU!
Burma Shave

Re:Stack Overflow?

[smittyoneeach]

I have this weird condition where I don't feel the slightest bit of shame over history I didn't cause or natural accidents over which I'd no control, e.g. my heritage.

Re:Stack Overflow?

[PopeRatzo]

I have this weird condition where I don't feel the slightest bit of shame over history I didn't cause

Do you understand that patriotism is nothing more than a condition of having pride over history you didn't cause? You of all people profess to have an abundance of that.

It's interesting which history you choose to celebrate and which you choose to ignore, considering you had no part in either. Further, you also seem inordinately fond of your white European-American heritage, and concerned about it's preservation, considering that's also something over which you had no control, e.g. your heritage.

As a thoughtful person, don't you find that interesting?

Re:Big Mac Index

[ILongForDarkness]

Not a citation but a bit of an explanation why the earlier authors comment on the Big Mac index deserves consideration. Differential pricing. For example: I live in Canada, we pay more for pretty much every good then the US even for goods made in Canada. In economics one of the factors is called price elasticity of demand. It varies with product (luxury, stable), availablity of substitutes but also by culture/country. Canada and europe generally have fairly low price elasticities (a comparable change in price has a smaller effect on demand than in the US) so that means companies gouge us because the optimal price/demand tradeoff lands at a higher price. A Toyota Camry made in Cambridge Ontario will sell for more there than if you buy it across the border in Detriot, even before taxes. Why: because they can.

The problem holds for the Big Mac index. Sure a Ukrainian developer can buy a lot of Big Macs with their salary but is that because they earn more, or McDonalds is taking a smaller margin to try to gain market share, government subsidizes of favorable exchange rates are lowering the cost of ingredients, or culturally Ukrainians aren't as big on fast food or have better substitutes? Who knows. But just having a single number you can't account for other factors.

Re:Huge red flag about the survey

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

If I need to know about executeFoo() in SomeLibrary, I can:

• Google "SomeLibrary executeFoo"
• Go to SomeLibrary.com, and navigate through Support->Documents->API->executeFoo
• Thumb through a dead-tree SomeLibrary book until reaching executeFoo

I've tried all three, and vastly prefer the simple Google search. Not only will SomeLibrary.com be in the first 3 results (assuming their documentation doesn't suck), but there's a good chance you'll find a StackOverflow thread that not only explains executeFoo, but also covers the caveats and options better than the documentation.

Code samples tend to be more elegant than my own code. Many questions have multiple samples by multiple authors refined by multiple editors over multiple years. In comparison, I find API documentation often turns stale, or the samples are too simple to cover the cases I'm interested in. I don't "spend my life copy-pasting" - code samples tend to be useless for any real-life task. But I do get to see a gallery of how other people have solved similar problems.

Technology section seems... odd

[Dave Emami]

Javascript and AngularJS and NodeJS? If you're using one of the latter, aren't you using the former by definition? And also, while I have nothing against Angular (learning at the moment myself), is it really more-used than jQuery? I see jQuery all over the place when I look into the source of sites I find interesting, far more often than I run into Angular.

Re:Stack Overflow?

[St.Creed]

If you are a consultant and have some other consulting friends, and a good plan, you can just start out with founding a small consulting firm and then hiring a few other people as work picks up (assuming you're good at what you do). After a while you can spend more and more time on either product development, management or other activities, as you see fit.

This is the pattern I've seen for many small firms I work with. There's no reason it can't work for others.

Re:Stack Overflow?

[Dr_Barnowl]

You can't continue to have that patriotism in view of the observable facts - your government is by the few, for the few, and the people be damned. I agree that it's great that a government was founded with these ideals - but as laid out in the constitution, the time would seem to have come to throw what you have away and replace it with a government for the people again.

True patriotism would be revolution.

Re:Stack Overflow?

[PopeRatzo]

Does there exist a topic you don't spray your pussy blood all over?

How could anyone wonder why women wouldn't want to work in tech?

There is the nerdbro in full.