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I doubt that most developers ever choose a language to work on at work. They usually join a pre-existing project that already has enough of an investment into a

I doubt that most developers ever choose a language to work on at work. They usually join a pre-existing project that already has enough of an investment into a given language that choosing any other language requires a very compelling reason. To see what languages developers are actively choosing as opposed to going along with, you'll need to measure the proportion of languages used among greenfield projects (and ideally truly greenfield ones, i.e. ones that don't require technical support from other teams within the same org). I don't have data for this, but I'd be surprised if Go wasn't way high up on that list (and on Android, similarly for Kotlin). So does anybody have data on greenfield projects? N.B. I also wouldn't be surprised if the majority of developers hardly ever chose a language for anything, that is I wouldn't surprised if the majority of developers have never started a substantial project from scratch and have only ever joined existing ones. A lot of people prefer to do things other than code in their free time and again, in the workplace, especially in large organizations, it's perfectly possible to only ever work on pre-existing codebases.

davedx 7y ago
Only anecdotes, but I've had the opportunity to be responsible for the choice of language in some greenfield projects, usually relatively small line of business applications. My choice is almost always nodejs, lately with TypeScript front ends and my most recent project using TypeScript on the node side too. The reasons for this choice (I've also worked with Ruby, Scala, C#, Java etc): * JavaScript developers are everywhere, it's an accessible language to learn with tons of libraries and a huge community * Nodejs is a simple and great general purpose backend platform that will get you really far for 95% of use cases. It scales well, has a simple concurrency model and simple deployment and ops tooling * Using same language on front end and back end reduces cognitive overhead. My biggest client at the moment uses C# on back end and TypeScript on front, and despite them both being very nice Microsoft languages there's still so many differences

davedx 7y ago

Only anecdotes, but I've had the opportunity to be responsible for the choice of language in some greenfield projects, usually relatively small line of business applications. My choice is almost always nodejs, lately with TypeScript front ends and my most recent project using TypeScript on the node side too. The reasons for this choice (I've also worked with Ruby, Scala, C#, Java etc): * JavaScript developers are everywhere, it's an accessible language to learn with tons of libraries and a huge community * Nodejs is a simple and great general purpose backend platform that will get you really far for 95% of use cases. It scales well, has a simple concurrency model and simple deployment and ops tooling * Using same language on front end and back end reduces cognitive overhead. My biggest client at the moment uses C# on back end and TypeScript on front, and despite them both being very nice Microsoft languages there's still so many differences