5 ms·

This is probably skewed. We did our best to make sure we were getting a wide swath of respondents by also running the survey on StackOverflow, but even there,

by gecko 16y ago

This is probably skewed. We did our best to make sure we were getting a wide swath of respondents by also running the survey on StackOverflow, but even there, our choice of which tags to advertise the survey with probably biased the results. I'd take the OS distribution not as an indication of who in general developers for which OS, but rather just as information on which percentage of respondents were on which OS. I.e., it tells you about the survey, not about developers in general.

technomancy 16y ago
Stackoverflow itself seemed pretty Windows-centric last I looked at it. Makes sense considering it was launched by two prominent Windows developers.
- statictype 16y ago
  For some time, when Apple had its goofy NDA on the iPhone SDK when it was first released, Stackoverflow was probably the best site to get CocoaTouch related help. It's still a pretty decent resource for iPhone development.
streeter 16y ago
I'm not as convinced this is terribly skewed away from the normal. Outside the Bay Area, the large organizations that hire thousands of programmers primarily use Windows for development. For example, go to any Defense Contractor (Lockheed, Northrop, etc) in the country and sample the computers they use for dev work. Each developer probably has a Windows box they do everything on. There might be some Linux boxes mixed in, but those will probably be headless. Or the developer runs Linux in a VM on top of Windows. While in the Bay Area, we might think these are skewed because everywhere we go we see Mac laptops, in reality, the employees at big corporations are going to outnumber us.
- zwieback 16y ago
  I can confirm this (working at mega-corp) and can also add that a lot of specialized and embedded tools are primarily hosted on Windows. Even high-end CAD and modelling tools are primarily on Windows where I've worked.
  - andrewem 16y ago
    High-end CAD tools used to be run almost entirely on Unix systems (Solaris, SGI, HP/UX, etc.). Back in the 1990s Windows systems couldn't handle these tools the way Unix workstations could, but once that changed there was no reason to spend far more money on a workstation. Perhaps if Linux had become popular a few years sooner the transition in high-end CAD would've been from proprietary Unix to Linux. See for instance http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/support.htm http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/support.htm where support for various *nix are being phased out by Parametric Technology, Linux included.
    - zwieback 16y ago
      Yeah, I remember those days well, we had Unix boxes for CAD and 386s with Win3 for office work side-by-side. I think you're right - the transition to Linux would have been an obvious choice if the timing had been better.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I suspect that the survey is skewed in other directions when it comes to large corporations, though. I would expect to see much more Perforce if the big not-primarily-computer-companies were included, because for many years Perforce was pretty much the only game in town for large, multi-million-line codebases. I still can't imagine Lockheed running their sourcebase off Subversion or VSS; even when I interned at a mid-sized (~100 person) government contractor, we used Perforce. I think the survey is representative of the geographically-distributed, Joel-on-Software reading, micro-ISV crowd, and not much else. Micro-ISVs often develop on Windows (because that's what their founders are used to) and use Subversion (because it's fairly easy to setup and generally adequate for 1-10 devs). I suspect you'd get very different numbers at YCombinator or Google or Lockheed, though.
- roedog 16y ago
  Another mega-corp data point: 15,000 Engineers plus everyone else uses desktop/laptop windows XP. Linux is used on the supercomputing clusters and on test equipment in the factory. IT controls the desktop domains, while the engineers control the clusters and test equipment.

by gecko 16y ago

technomancy 16y ago

Stackoverflow itself seemed pretty Windows-centric last I looked at it. Makes sense considering it was launched by two prominent Windows developers.

statictype 16y ago
For some time, when Apple had its goofy NDA on the iPhone SDK when it was first released, Stackoverflow was probably the best site to get CocoaTouch related help. It's still a pretty decent resource for iPhone development.

streeter 16y ago

I'm not as convinced this is terribly skewed away from the normal. Outside the Bay Area, the large organizations that hire thousands of programmers primarily use Windows for development. For example, go to any Defense Contractor (Lockheed, Northrop, etc) in the country and sample the computers they use for dev work. Each developer probably has a Windows box they do everything on. There might be some Linux boxes mixed in, but those will probably be headless. Or the developer runs Linux in a VM on top of Windows. While in the Bay Area, we might think these are skewed because everywhere we go we see Mac laptops, in reality, the employees at big corporations are going to outnumber us.

zwieback 16y ago
I can confirm this (working at mega-corp) and can also add that a lot of specialized and embedded tools are primarily hosted on Windows. Even high-end CAD and modelling tools are primarily on Windows where I've worked.
- andrewem 16y ago
  High-end CAD tools used to be run almost entirely on Unix systems (Solaris, SGI, HP/UX, etc.). Back in the 1990s Windows systems couldn't handle these tools the way Unix workstations could, but once that changed there was no reason to spend far more money on a workstation. Perhaps if Linux had become popular a few years sooner the transition in high-end CAD would've been from proprietary Unix to Linux. See for instance http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/support.htm http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/support.htm where support for various *nix are being phased out by Parametric Technology, Linux included.
  - zwieback 16y ago
    Yeah, I remember those days well, we had Unix boxes for CAD and 386s with Win3 for office work side-by-side. I think you're right - the transition to Linux would have been an obvious choice if the timing had been better.
nostrademons 16y ago
I suspect that the survey is skewed in other directions when it comes to large corporations, though. I would expect to see much more Perforce if the big not-primarily-computer-companies were included, because for many years Perforce was pretty much the only game in town for large, multi-million-line codebases. I still can't imagine Lockheed running their sourcebase off Subversion or VSS; even when I interned at a mid-sized (~100 person) government contractor, we used Perforce. I think the survey is representative of the geographically-distributed, Joel-on-Software reading, micro-ISV crowd, and not much else. Micro-ISVs often develop on Windows (because that's what their founders are used to) and use Subversion (because it's fairly easy to setup and generally adequate for 1-10 devs). I suspect you'd get very different numbers at YCombinator or Google or Lockheed, though.
roedog 16y ago
Another mega-corp data point: 15,000 Engineers plus everyone else uses desktop/laptop windows XP. Linux is used on the supercomputing clusters and on test equipment in the factory. IT controls the desktop domains, while the engineers control the clusters and test equipment.