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As a non web developer I am fairly surprised that about 50% of developers are "web developers". Is this the distribution in the global developer population as

by seren 11y ago

As a non web developer I am fairly surprised that about 50% of developers are "web developers". Is this the distribution in the global developer population as well ? Or is this a bias due to Stackoverflow which by its very nature is web centric ?

d0lph 11y ago
Web is where the new stuff is happening, if you see a new framework or library 90% of the time it is some JS/browser based language. Thus this leads to a larger online community of people trying to make stuff work, and in the end more SO users. Not to mention web apps being the new big thing. To further that I think a lot of devs that tinker with things outside of work tend to tinker with web stuff more.
- chadcmulligan 11y ago
  Web is where the new stuff was happening. The browser is very constrained - most of the 'new' stuff is to get around the browser shortcomings - e.g. react, angular. These are to solve front end problems that have been long solved on desktop environments (.Net, Delphi, VB maybe even Obj C though I'm not a fan) Actual new tech is in the mobile sphere now imho, or server side AI, very little of this is web development except for the occasional front end for said apps.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    As a former desktop developer, current web developer I think WebAssembly has a decent shot at changing that. The tools I use now are significantly more crude in the business domain/for line of business stuff than I was using in the days of Delph 5. Personally, give me something that can run Qt (or something like it) and Python in the browser and I'm 95% to been in heaven.
manyxcxi 11y ago
I see it kind of like this: 10 years ago when I had my first official job post college we needed some tools for interacting with our manufacturing data sets. I opened up Visual Studio and created some Windows applications and installers. Then we deployed a web service written in Java (because at the time any web server we had was *nix) to create some additional functionality and hooked the desktop apps up to it. Then we swapped out the desktop apps because too many people were not upgrading and getting all kinds of errors. Or desktop support was getting too many calls because the end user had a borked environment. This was all many moons ago and happened in the span of 18 months. I started out as a desktop and server API application developer. Today I haven't written an exe since I left that job but to build UIs over the years I had to learn HTML/CSS/JS. That is, I feel, we got the 'original' full stack developer.
- seren 11y ago
  I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application (maybe native app as well at some point). However, they are plenty fields from machine learning, to robotics that are also likely on the rise that would require some SW development skills. Also, as mentioned by d0lph, I believe the high churn in web technology makes more people relying on SO, compared to let's say someone coding in C99. But my view is probably skewed by working in embedded SW.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    >I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates disagree with you[1]. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhW8cp15tk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhW8cp15tk
    - xemoka 11y ago
      In 2007. Everything changes, it's our only constant.
      - TheLogothete 11y ago
        What has changed in the limitations of the DOM?
        xemoka 11y ago
        Perhaps not in the limitations of the DOM, but how we deal with it is changing.
        TheLogothete 11y ago
        Their arguments are just as valid as then. Web interfaces will never be as rich as desktop ones. Cloud connected desktop applications will gain a lot of momentum going forward.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 11y ago
Biased towards users of StackOverflow, not developers in general. Unless you believe the population of developers who took the survey is representative of the entire world of software developers--I'd be willing to bet it's not.
- douche 11y ago
  Yep, StackOverflow tends to be a ghost town on non-web-related technologies, and basic programming language contructs/techniques - and those are heavily weighted towards Ruby/Java/C#/Python, where the questions are not necessarily about web dev, but you can tell the questioner is working on the back-end of a web app.
- vram22 11y ago
  Right.

by seren 11y ago

d0lph 11y ago

Web is where the new stuff is happening, if you see a new framework or library 90% of the time it is some JS/browser based language. Thus this leads to a larger online community of people trying to make stuff work, and in the end more SO users. Not to mention web apps being the new big thing. To further that I think a lot of devs that tinker with things outside of work tend to tinker with web stuff more.

chadcmulligan 11y ago
Web is where the new stuff was happening. The browser is very constrained - most of the 'new' stuff is to get around the browser shortcomings - e.g. react, angular. These are to solve front end problems that have been long solved on desktop environments (.Net, Delphi, VB maybe even Obj C though I'm not a fan) Actual new tech is in the mobile sphere now imho, or server side AI, very little of this is web development except for the occasional front end for said apps.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  As a former desktop developer, current web developer I think WebAssembly has a decent shot at changing that. The tools I use now are significantly more crude in the business domain/for line of business stuff than I was using in the days of Delph 5. Personally, give me something that can run Qt (or something like it) and Python in the browser and I'm 95% to been in heaven.

manyxcxi 11y ago

I see it kind of like this: 10 years ago when I had my first official job post college we needed some tools for interacting with our manufacturing data sets. I opened up Visual Studio and created some Windows applications and installers. Then we deployed a web service written in Java (because at the time any web server we had was *nix) to create some additional functionality and hooked the desktop apps up to it. Then we swapped out the desktop apps because too many people were not upgrading and getting all kinds of errors. Or desktop support was getting too many calls because the end user had a borked environment. This was all many moons ago and happened in the span of 18 months. I started out as a desktop and server API application developer. Today I haven't written an exe since I left that job but to build UIs over the years I had to learn HTML/CSS/JS. That is, I feel, we got the 'original' full stack developer.

seren 11y ago
I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application (maybe native app as well at some point). However, they are plenty fields from machine learning, to robotics that are also likely on the rise that would require some SW development skills. Also, as mentioned by d0lph, I believe the high churn in web technology makes more people relying on SO, compared to let's say someone coding in C99. But my view is probably skewed by working in embedded SW.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  >I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates disagree with you[1]. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhW8cp15tk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhW8cp15tk
  - xemoka 11y ago
    In 2007. Everything changes, it's our only constant.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      What has changed in the limitations of the DOM?
      - xemoka 11y ago
        Perhaps not in the limitations of the DOM, but how we deal with it is changing.
        TheLogothete 11y ago
        Their arguments are just as valid as then. Web interfaces will never be as rich as desktop ones. Cloud connected desktop applications will gain a lot of momentum going forward.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ryandrake 11y ago

Biased towards users of StackOverflow, not developers in general. Unless you believe the population of developers who took the survey is representative of the entire world of software developers--I'd be willing to bet it's not.

douche 11y ago
Yep, StackOverflow tends to be a ghost town on non-web-related technologies, and basic programming language contructs/techniques - and those are heavily weighted towards Ruby/Java/C#/Python, where the questions are not necessarily about web dev, but you can tell the questioner is working on the back-end of a web app.
vram22 11y ago
Right.