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.

Comments

Re:Wrong

[phantomfive]

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.

Popularity contest say very little

[Casandro]

Javascript is used for many Terabytes of completely needless code for Websites.
Java is in large part popular because many universities teach it to their students. Essentially it's similar to the question what language you know.

What would be more interesting would be to ask the same question for different uses.

Re:Popularity contest say very little

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wrong

[ShanghaiBill]

Most used is probably cobal

I have met hundreds of developers. Many of them work in finance, payroll, and business process programming. None of them have used Cobol in more than 20 years. I am sure there are a few legacy Cobol programs still out there, but it is not common at all, and it is a myth that there is a vast secret parallel world of Cobol programmers slaving away in gigantic cubicle farms.

fortran, c, c++ or maybe ada

Fortran is used for HPC, but even there C++ is displacing it.

Ada is not even used by the military anymore for new projects. Airbus uses it for their flight control computers. It is mostly dead.

Re:Wrong

[Crashmarik]

The cost of the psychotherapy to go with APL would be prohibitive.

What was the *actual* polling methodology?

[mykepredko]

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...

Re:Wrong

[mrsquid0]

A lot of scientific programming has migrated to Python (etc.), but not the software that requires speed. Python is an interpreted language while Fortran is compiled, so Python simply is not fast enough for some projects. Climate modeling, weather forecasts, most fluid dynamics code, and so on, need to be compiled to get enough speed. Usually this mean Fortran of C++. Python (etc.) is great for some forms of data analysis and smaller projects, but it has not replaced the heavy-lifting languages in the sciences, and is not likely to for a long time.

Re:Wrong

[Joce640k]

This 'story' needs the GIF of Captain Picard going, "Oh, no, not this crap AGAIN".

https://memegenerator.net/img/...

Re:Kotlin? What a joke.

[jb_nizet]

You need to get out of your cave. Kotlin is now the primary language that Google advises to use to develop Android apps (you've heard of Android, right?), and it's becoming strong on the server-side as well, where Spring (the most used server-side framework on the JVM, which is itself the most used programming platform), among others pushes its use too.

Re:Wrong

[OrangeTide]

Fortran isn't used to generate garbage mini-programs for advertisements. It's clear how JavaScript is used more than anything else despite its very short life.

I wouldn't be surprised if more JavaScript is written in a year than in all of COBOL's lifetime. I don't have the numbers, so I don't know. but something to think about.

That said being the most used or the most popular doesn't really mean these languages are the best. (depends on what you measure the language by)

Re:Wrong

[gweihir]

The whole article is cheerleading for some of the worst technologies ever to get mainstream attention, so forget about factual accuracy.

Re:Kotlin? What a joke.

[gweihir]

Fun fact: "Kot" literally means "shit" in German....