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Python Developer Survey Shows Data Analysis More Popular Than Web Development (jetbrains.com)

Over 20,000 programmers from more than 150 different countries provided answers for the second annual Python Developers Survey (conducted by the Python Software Foundation and JeBrains).

An anonymous reader submitted this condensed version of their results: 84% of Python users in our survey use Python as their main language...up 5 percentage points from 79% in 2017. But half of all Python users in the survey also use JavaScript, and 47% more say they use HTML/CSS. Reported use of Bash/Shell has also grown from 36% in 2017 to 45% in 2018. [Later 93% of respondents said that their activities included Software testing/Writing automated tests.] Python users who report that they also use Go and SQL have both increased by 2 percentage points, while many other languages (including C/C++, Java, and C#) have decreased their share...

When asked "What do you use Python for?" data analysis has become more popular than Web development, growing from 50% in 2017 to 58% in 2018. Machine learning also grew by 7 percentage points. These types of development are experiencing faster growth than Web development, which has only increased by 2 percentage points when compared to the previous year...

Almost two-thirds of respondents selected Linux as their development environment OS. Most people are using free or open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite... Twenty-something was the prevalent age range among our respondents, with almost a third being in their thirties. [31% more were between the ages of 30 and 39.]

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. A new generation of users by jma05 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most of the new users since perhaps around 2012 came for the data analytics side.

    IPython, NumPy, SciPy had been around for a while, but with maturing Jupyter, Pandas and TensorFlow/Keras, it really caught on. Other NLP and Machine Learning libraries probably helped too.

    My use of Python today is completely different from how I used it earlier, nearly two decades ago, when it was mainly seen as a better Perl, back when Perl was THE scripting language. Now it is seen as a better MATLAB or a better R, even though the base language isn't itself vectorized as the others. The language and the standard library didn't improve much towards this. It was mainly the third party libraries that emerged and matured.

    Speaking purely from a language standpoint, Julia has all right features for the analytics side, but the scientific community is right now with Python.

    1. Re:A new generation of users by Nivag064 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Most of the new users since perhaps around 2012 came for the data analytics side.

      IPython, NumPy, SciPy had been around for a while, but with maturing Jupyter, Pandas and TensorFlow/Keras, it really caught on. Other NLP and Machine Learning libraries probably helped too.

      My use of Python today is completely different from how I used it earlier, nearly two decades ago, when it was mainly seen as a better Perl, back when Perl was THE scripting language. Now it is seen as a better MATLAB or a better R, even though the base language isn't itself vectorized as the others. The language and the standard library didn't improve much towards this. It was mainly the third party libraries that emerged and matured.

      Speaking purely from a language standpoint, Julia has all right features for the analytics side, but the scientific community is right now with Python.

      SageMath is free and is easily accessible from Python. It runs on Linux, and other O/S's including those from Microsoft.

      SageMath is very powerful and is a good alternative to MatLab and Mathematica.

      http://www.sagemath.org/
      [...]
      SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.

      Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.
      [...]

    2. Re:A new generation of users by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Node is the only sensible choice today.

      For frontend, node is a reasonable choice. For backend, node has all the same problems as Python (a very lousy type system), plus backwards compatibility problems that are like butterflies on crack, plus security issues that don't really come up with other systems.

      Python is strongly typed, you can look it up.

      Python uses duck typing that is checked at runtime, not compile time. That is only strong in a very narrow, academic sense of the word.

      More to the point, it doesn't matter if you want to call it weak or strong. It will cause problems as your site grows and you need to refactor things. If you think ahead and build a strong unit test suite, then it will be less of a problem.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."