Slashdot Mirror
Survey: JavaScript is the Most-Used Language, But Java is the Most Popular (sdtimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes SD Times
Java remains the most popular primary programming language, but JavaScript is the most used programming language overall. That is according to a recently released report from JetBrains on the State of the Developer Ecosystem in 2018. The report surveyed more than 6,000 developers from 17 countries to reveal the trends driving the world of coding this year... According to the report, Java, JavaScript and Python are the top three programming languages this year, and Go is the most promising language. Twenty percent of developers use multiple versions of Go at the same time, and 26 percent set up their GOPATH per project. The top Go frameworks include Gin, Beego, Echo and Buffalo.
While 38 percent of developers have no plans to adopt any new languages this year, the top languages respondents have started to learn in the last year include Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, TypeScript and Kotlin... Eighty-two percent of respondents use IDEs while 69 percent use editors. Of those using IDEs and editors, only 12 percent cited that they don't customize their IDE/editors. In addition, 77 percent use the dark theme for their editor or IDE... Some fun facts about developers include 77 percent listen to music while they are coding; the top music to listen to includes electronic, pop and rock; 53 percent sleep seven to eight hours a night; 85 percent code on the weekends; and 57 percent prefer coffee over tea.
While 38 percent of developers have no plans to adopt any new languages this year, the top languages respondents have started to learn in the last year include Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, TypeScript and Kotlin... Eighty-two percent of respondents use IDEs while 69 percent use editors. Of those using IDEs and editors, only 12 percent cited that they don't customize their IDE/editors. In addition, 77 percent use the dark theme for their editor or IDE... Some fun facts about developers include 77 percent listen to music while they are coding; the top music to listen to includes electronic, pop and rock; 53 percent sleep seven to eight hours a night; 85 percent code on the weekends; and 57 percent prefer coffee over tea.
Most used is probably cobal,
There are still shops that use cobol, but no one starts new projects in that language, and people have been migrating away from it for a while. The pay for that skill is low, and you'd do better learning APL.
Fortran used to get a lot of use in the math areas, but they've all switched to python (numpy), R, or matlab. Combined, these do everything fortran did but better.
It's important to remember that there are an order of magnitude more programmers now than there were in the days cobol was popular, and they write a lot of code. Java is the new COBOL, and has been for 15 years.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From TFA: "More than 15K people participated in the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2018, but only the responses of 6K respondents were included in this report." They go on to say that they used social media to find their population and weighted the results according to countries and whether or not the respondent was a student.
So why should I consider these results as representative of anything? First, almost 2/3rds of the responses weren't used and then, on the responses they deemed acceptable, they were weighted in some way which they don't explain.
I bet that if I took the same data, applied my own response filter and weighting system, I could show that:
- Pascal is the number one programming language
- Arduino IDE is the most popular development environment
- 42% listen to old Jack Benny radio shows while coding
and so on...
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
While this undoubtedly happens, it isn't why Java is popular.
Java is popular because it has a very large ecosystem. In its early days, Sun and especially IBM threw a lot of weight behind it. This meant it had a good IDE early on, and key libraries became available quickly (e.g. the JDBC API standardized SQL database support, and all the database companies quickly supported it).
Also "write once, run everywhere" wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of lot better than the contemporary alternatives.
This got the snowball rolling, and it has built up momentum ever since. Today, the Java ecosystem is simply much bigger than everyone else. More libraries, more and better tools, more installed base, more questions answered on StackOverflow, and more programmers (admittedly of varying skill levels). It is essentially the standard in corporate IT.
The whole article is cheerleading for some of the worst technologies ever to get mainstream attention, so forget about factual accuracy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.