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2020 Developer Survey Results

148 points by caution 6y ago

mtmail 6y ago
The full results https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020
- skoskie 6y ago
  Thank you! I came here to ask why there was only one chart. Just wasn’t clear on mobile that it wasn’t the main report.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  dang: Could you point to this article, instead of the summary? A few things I noticed: Other than management and sysadmin, the area with the highest average seniority was embedded programming. That fits nicely with my view that embedded is an area with less age age discrimination. Haskell pays better than C++, by a fair amount internationally, but only fractionally better in the US. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I thought it was interesting.
- zerr 6y ago
  Wow, the map shows Crimea (the region of Ukraine occupied by Russia) as part of Russia.
tchaffee 6y ago
Some of those stats could use better context. At least for what I am curious about. Just for example, the years of experience of developers who visit SO. It would be interesting if we knew that in the larger world, equal number of programmers were in each experience bracket. So then we could see which experience group visits SO the most often. But we already know there are far more programmers with 5 to 9 years experience than there are programmers with 35 to 39 years experience. So are those stats showing anything other than the natural bell curve of experience distribution of all programmers in the world? If we had the experience distribution over all programmers whether or not they visit SO that we could compare with, it would be interesting to see any differences. My guess is that there isn't. I bet highly experienced programmers visit SO just as often as those with 5 to 9 years experience. Maybe to a recruiter or for someone paying for job adverts, those numbers are interesting on their own.
shay_ker 6y ago
Absolutely amazed that MongoDB is the most wanted database at 19.4%, and is less dreaded than MySQL. What is their marketing team doing that's so effective?
- bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y ago
  Can kind of say the same about Rust. Benefits aside, it's hard to imagine a more hostile language. Is it the language or the idea of the language people are thrilled about?
  - jhasse 6y ago
    > [...] it's hard to imagine a more hostile language. C++?
    - bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y ago
      Hostile, but not more. C++ isn't completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades.
      - HideousKojima 6y ago
        >C++ isn't completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades. Neither is Rust, most of the things that seem weird or new in Rust already exist in functional languages.
      - wwright 6y ago
        I heavily disagree, as someone who uses C++ as my primary language at my job for the last three years, and who has a lot of experience in many other languages. It has developed a lot of idiosyncrasies that range from "confusing unique syntax" to "using these two features together will blow your app up with no warning from the compiler".
      - tene 6y ago
        I'm very confused by this claim. Rust's borrow checker is new, but everything else in the language is extremely familiar and recognizable to me from other languages I've worked with. Structs and enums are all over the place Free function definitions, and methods defined on a data type, are extremely common Rust Traits are ways of naming groups of operations to be associated with different types, and share a lot of similarity with Type classes, roles, interfaces, mixins, etc. present in many common languages async/await is similarly present in many common languages Generics / Parametric Polymorphism, extremely familiar from C++, Java, C#, etc. It's almost all modern takes on normal common PL things that have been in many languages for decades So by my perspective, I see a very normal imperative language, with its own take and small quirks on very familiar features, and the only feature I've been able to come up with that's "completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades" is the borrow checker. One new unique feature seems well within the weirdness budget of a new language. Could you expand a bit more on what it looks like from your perspective? What other features or properties of the language seem strange, alien, foreign, or otherwise completely unfamiliar to you?
yamrzou 6y ago
Interestingly, job priorities for men and women are not the same[1] : Men place higher importance on "Languages, frameworks, and other technologies I'd be working with", while for women, "Office environment or company culture" and "Flex time or a flexible schedule" come first. [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-most-important-job-factors https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-most-imp...
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Another data point against the wage gap being a result of sexism
  - 0xEFF 6y ago
    Except people who have flexible schedules are generally paid more.
    - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
      Working flexible hours when the company chooses the hours normally pays more but working flexible hours when you choose the hours normally pays less.
      - zerr 6y ago
        No, it means you're a consultant and charge premium.
  - wwright 6y ago
    How do you tie this correlation to the negative of that causation?
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    Women are more likely than men to adjust their work schedules in order to provide childcare[1] because we have entrenched gender expectations about who "should" shoulder what responsibilities in a heterosexual relationship. [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/01/women-more-than-men-adjust-their-careers-for-family-life/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/01/women-more-...
yamrzou 6y ago
> 52% of respondents think “Hello, old friend” when they search for a coding solution online and find that the first result link is purple because they’ve already visited the link. It's amazing how no solution has yet been found for this very real problem.
gitgud 6y ago
Wow I'm in the most popular demographic again! "White or of European descent: 68.3%" ...seriously though, how relevant is that racial statistic? Should we break it down by eye color? Hair color?... I think categorising people based on race does more harm than good...
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  People evidently find it interesting. You did, enough to post about it, for example.
- freehunter 6y ago
  Racism and sexism is a constant complaint against the tech industry. But unless someone is actually compiling data on it, no one knows how bad the problem actually is (or if it’s actually even a real problem). Problems don’t get solved unless they’re being tracked.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    So what problem is being tracked by showing this statistic, exactly?
    - freehunter 6y ago
      Come on man, it was the first sentence of my comment.
      - pdimitar 6y ago
        Your first sentence was a generalisation. I still don't see how reasserting that somebody is white helps... anything related to the problems of racism and sexism, really. Help me here?
        freehunter 6y ago
        I'm having a hard time assuming good faith based on your comments so I'm going to bow out of this conversation. I'd suggest you take some time to stop and think about why someone might want to track demographic statistics in a field that is constantly under fire for being dominated by young white men.
rmdashrfstar 6y ago
My tech stack: Rust, Redis, MongoDB, is most loved on Stack Overflow, and most hated on HN! That must be a good sign. :) Rust is a complete breakthrough in modern popular languages as a safe, fast, and expressive alternative. MongoDB, or really any aggregate-oriented database, is perfect when you’re modeling your domain as aggregates and you align your data access patterns with the design of these aggregates. Do your homework to set the right settings, take regular backups, then focus on what matters (hint: it’s not really persistence). Redis is a no-brainer, it’s just plain great for managing user sessions. There’s a place for everything, keep your mind open :) https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PolyglotPersistence.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PolyglotPersistence.html
evanriley 6y ago
What happened to Clojure? If I remember, it was in the top 10 for most loved language, and now I don't even see it mentioned anywhere.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Seems completely excluded, not even mentioned together with the rest of the JVM languages in the "How Technologies Are Connected". My guess would be that Clojure developers generally don't use Stack Overflow as much as others, so usage over there is low enough to not be a mark on their radar. Rest assure, nothing has drastically changed from last year, the same people who loved Clojure then, loves Clojure now :)
Xcelerate 6y ago
I’m a bit surprised Julia is ranked below Python for how much developers love the language. I’ve programmed extensively in both, and with Julia it’s an absolute joy, while I always feel like I’m fighting with Python to get it to do what I want (efficiently, at the very least).
- KenoFischer 6y ago
  Honestly, I'm pretty happy there were enough responses for them to actually call it out separately in the results. I'm not sure that was the case last year. Also, I think Julia's audience tends to not hang out on StackOverflow as much, since they're often scientists primarily and software developers second. Sure they use StackOverflow, but how many have an account and would answer a survey.
  - s1t5 6y ago
    > Also, I think Julia's audience tends to not hang out on StackOverflow as much, since they're often scientists primarily and software developers second. My impression is the opposite. Julia forces you to think more about CS concepts early on (which is nice) while with Python or R you can get further by just figuring out the syntax for what you want to do and not worrying about how your code is executed.
    - KenoFischer 6y ago
      Sure, that seems plausible, but I still don't think that translates into the kind of user that would take the StackOverflow survey, which I suspect to mostly be users that are quite active on StackOverflow. More generally, I'm seeing StackOverflow metrics underperform on Julia compared to other languages (as opposed to things like Discourse usage for example).
axegon_ 6y ago
Rust still on top. Real shame there are so few Rust jobs out there. I agree, the language is still changing way too much but that is to be expected from a relatively new language. A lot of polishing has been done and imo, it's a production ready language at this point. Tooling is awesome, cargo is awesome, packaging is great. The compiler is still very slow, despite a lot of improvements on that front but that is to be expected given Rust's nature. Real shame it's so underused in the real world :/
- skohan 6y ago
  There are also not that many actual professional rust developers out there. I think there are a lot of developers who love the idea of rust, and are curious about rust, but I suspect the number of developers who have actually completed a rust project of meaningful complexity and deployed it to production is vanishingly small.
  - dochtman 6y ago
    The metric used by Stack Overflow is "% of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it", so it seems likely to me are likely to have some understanding of what writing Rust code is like. You seem to equate "actual professional" with "meaningful complexity" or "deployed to production", which seems limited. I'm pretty sure I've written meaningfully complex code outside my day job -- and I would guess many open source developers write such code outside the context of their job.
    - dtech 6y ago
      Unfortunately, people have a tendency to not read the question well or just lie to support their favorite.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      If the question included the word "professionally", I think it would be a lot more meaningful.
- 6y ago
dahfizz 6y ago
Surprised to see JavaScript so low on the average salary by programming language[1]. Browsing HN you'd think that everything outside the browser is dead and long gone. [1]https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-what-languages-are-associated-with-the-highest-salaries-worldwide-united-states https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-wh...
- quantummkv 6y ago
  It's a classic case of supply/demand dynamics. There are a lot more JavaScript developers than demand so the prices are low.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    As an anecdote, I am not a professional programmer but I was writing some code to solve a problem at work and when it got to the front end stuff I was told not to worry about it because they would just get a cheap contractor to build the front end. The backend needed to be written by an expert who knows the problem and understands the solution but the front end can be spec’d out and outsourced to cheaper contractors. I don’t usually live in the world of enterprise programming so I’m not sure how normal that is, but it definitely surprised me.
  - hajile 6y ago
    There are tons of "Javascript Developers" who have no experience and about as much knowledge of the front-end. They usually make up the large crowd of "web consultants" that offer to make you a website for just $300 and then deliver wordpress with some skin they bought from somewhere. The web specs are millions of pages of legalese (and that's without mentioning things like WebGL which are handled by groups other than w3c). Learning all the stuff required for building a modern application on the web takes a long time. In addition, the incompatibilities and inconsistencies (between both browsers and browser versions) paired with the inconsistencies of much of the tooling and frameworks (though that has gotten much better in the past couple years) leads to a frustrating experience. If you need an actual web app and want to hire a knowledgeable developer who's willing to learn everything and not burn out from dealing with all the frustrating parts, it's very likely that you'll wind up paying more than for a back-end dev with similar amounts of experience.
champagnepapi 6y ago
"Formal Education Importance Almost 85% of the respondents that are professional developers feel that formal education is at least somewhat important, which is contrary to the popular idiom that you don't need formal education to become a developer. However, almost 16% believe that it is not at all important or necessary." Well as someone who doesn't have a formal comp. sci. education, this is a bit alarming for me. Personally didn't think the number was that high.
- bbeekley 6y ago
  Also as someone without formal CS education: I'm surprised too, though not alarmed. I've very rarely felt like I didn't have the right education to do my job at giantmegacorp w/ CS PhD coworkers. The bigger problem is that I feel a bit of a cultural outsider. There are jokes, stories, language that coworkers use and I'm just not familiar with. That can promote impostor syndrome and definitely affects interviews (eg "cultural fit").
- entha_saava 6y ago
  It is not about formal education itself though. Mostly 'bootcamp webshit' meme is - about those developers who don't know things like algorithm complexity or memory related stuff, working at a top level of a multi-layer stack leading to inefficient/bad code. The common consensus is it is pretty important for every developer to know some low level programming (C, asm) and algorithms/Data Structures stuff. Not so much about other things covered in standard CS curriculum.
- Izkata 6y ago
  As someone that was self-taught and then got a formal education (BS in CS), here's my explanation after having worked with new hires who only did bootcamps: Formal education is not necessary to be capable of doing the job, especially if you have some good people to learn from and are willing to learn on your own. However, it is very very good at filling in the things you don't realize you don't know. It provides a huge number of hooks in your mind you can investigate further as necessary on the job, as well as random little factoids you didn't know were important. For example, those bootcampers I worked with? Never encountered deep copy/shallow copy, and had trouble figuring out a bug caused by using shallow when it should have been deep. None of them had issues the moment it was explained to them, but they'd just never experienced it before, so had nothing to work from. Maybe they'd have figured it out and understood it eventually, or maybe they'd make guesses from StackOverflow and find something that works well enough without understanding why it works (so next time it comes up they're starting from scratch) (and yes, I have seen this). It's just lots of small things like this that make up that split (and a sibling comment mentions more of them). The survey was not well-structured to get this nuance.
pritambarhate 6y ago
It's interesting what Flutter has done for Dart! Before Flutter, I used to think Dart was dead. Typescript had won. If Flutter for Desktop becomes a viable option to create desktop apps, I think Electron will have a formidable competitor.
- skoskie 6y ago
  For the non-dart-speaking folks, what's flutter? Just a framework?
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    Yeah. It's just a UI framework for Dart
  - AnonC 6y ago
    > “Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for crafting beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.” [1] [1]: https://flutter.dev https://flutter.dev
  - hajile 6y ago
    It's basically React-like components, but implements everything to target Skia rather than native or web. It's big interesting feature (to me) is that they added a native compiler so they can run on iOS (which forbids JITs). As a language though, Dart is MUCH better than Typescript. If you're going to go all-in on types, at least go with a decent type system rather than one who's core objectives explicitly do NOT include soundness. https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibility.html#a-note-on-soundness https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...
- yagodragon 6y ago
  Is Flutter/Dart the Ruby on Rails of UI development? I know it may put some people off that we have to use a completely new language to solve problems we've already (kinda) solved, but I believe this time google got it right. The ideas, execution, tooling, and community are amazing. Give it an hour and you'll love it
dvdhnt 6y ago
Honestly, it's hard for me to take anything meaningful away from this survey. For example, it groups technology as "web frameworks" that just are not equitable [e.g. rail != express != jquery != react] and compares things like react native to node.js [makes no sense]. Personally, this survey feels more like a marketing handout than anything else and I would take it all with a giant grain of salt if at all.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  There is actually one thing this survey represents very accurately. Hype. Especially in the programming languages/frameworks section.
dzonga 6y ago
one thing, I wish StackOverflow would show is framework | language use across geographic distribution. And one thing, I liked was the data on variation in gender between developers in different countries. though it was just a few countries.
yagodragon 6y ago
What's the matter with Perl? I don't remember seeing it anywhere near the top-paying programming languages the last couple of years. What happened this year?
- ipnon 6y ago
  I don't think anything has happened to Perl. Instead, the popularity of all its alternatives has exploded. edit: I can count the number of Perl scripts I have used at my job (0). I cannot count the number of Node and Python scripts I have used at my job (there are too many). The niche has been filled.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It correlates strongly with tenure, which I imagine also correlates strongly with pay, so perl is transitively associated with money. I bet perl is also associated with SRE, the rarest and highest-paying role among these survey respondents.
amrrs 6y ago
Honestly, the detailed page https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 reads like a Stack Overflow Advertisement / Pushing than a normal survey highlights > When asked what steps to take when stuck on a coding problem, 90% of respondents indicated they visit Stack Overflow. > 0.3% of respondents had never visited Stack Overflow before taking the survey. > More than 40% of respondents reported that they are members of other online developer communities beyond Stack Overflow. > More than 15% of people find Stack Overflow at least somewhat more welcome than last year. We still have work to do, but it’s a start. A big difference from last year's page, if you check. Probably the effect of new CEO and bunch of new CTAs popping up everywhere about their paid tools!
apta 6y ago
> Participants’ responses regarding their sexual orientation are consistent with previous years. This is ridiculous. The left is going too far with identity politics. > For example, developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site. I wouldn't be surprised if this caused some outcry from a certain group of individuals since they will claim it "re-enforces gender stereotypes"
tryptophan 6y ago
Does anyone have any insights about why ASP NET Core is ranked so highly in the surveys? It doesn't get much discussion at all on HN. Is it just popular with 9-5 big-co dev jobs and their large numbers influence the survey?
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  I'm guessing here, but SO has always been very .NET-friendly place (it runs on Windows and .NET, and it was very active in the .NET-related topics when it started) which might skew results a bit. But again, guessing.
- akra 6y ago
  IMO ASP NET Core/NET Core is actually pretty good; seems lighter weight than Java at least to me. Beats most web frameworks in terms of raw performance, comes with all bells and whistles (e.g. even Grpc is supported with a built in server) but bolted on only as required. i.e. definitely beats in performance many web frameworks today (e.g. Spring Boot, etc) with a bit more "officially supported" polish which can be important for adoption. The problem still is the traditional .NET conservative developer culture that I've experienced in .NET jobs IMO. It stops them from trying out the best things in their space (e.g. F# as one thing that comes to mind). NET Core as a runtime on a Linux platform is actually pretty good these days. This can vary by team and company however so not a reason to not choose the technology per se.
Vinnl 6y ago
> When we break down differences in years since learning to code by gender, we notice some retention problems. We see a big drop off at the 10-14 year mark when compared to men, though we've seen some improvement from last year's survey. This is consistent with other research that women leave tech jobs at higher rates than men. I'm sure that women leave tech jobs at higher rates than men, but hasn't there been a stronger focus on educating women for tech jobs in recent years as well? In other words, if more women have been learning to code in the past decade, then I'd assume that that also leads to a larger percentage of women in tech having learned to code more recently.

148 points by caution 6y ago

mtmail 6y ago

The full results https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020

skoskie 6y ago
Thank you! I came here to ask why there was only one chart. Just wasn’t clear on mobile that it wasn’t the main report.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
dang: Could you point to this article, instead of the summary? A few things I noticed: Other than management and sysadmin, the area with the highest average seniority was embedded programming. That fits nicely with my view that embedded is an area with less age age discrimination. Haskell pays better than C++, by a fair amount internationally, but only fractionally better in the US. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I thought it was interesting.
zerr 6y ago
Wow, the map shows Crimea (the region of Ukraine occupied by Russia) as part of Russia.

tchaffee 6y ago

Some of those stats could use better context. At least for what I am curious about. Just for example, the years of experience of developers who visit SO. It would be interesting if we knew that in the larger world, equal number of programmers were in each experience bracket. So then we could see which experience group visits SO the most often. But we already know there are far more programmers with 5 to 9 years experience than there are programmers with 35 to 39 years experience. So are those stats showing anything other than the natural bell curve of experience distribution of all programmers in the world? If we had the experience distribution over all programmers whether or not they visit SO that we could compare with, it would be interesting to see any differences. My guess is that there isn't. I bet highly experienced programmers visit SO just as often as those with 5 to 9 years experience. Maybe to a recruiter or for someone paying for job adverts, those numbers are interesting on their own.

shay_ker 6y ago

Absolutely amazed that MongoDB is the most wanted database at 19.4%, and is less dreaded than MySQL. What is their marketing team doing that's so effective?

bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y ago
Can kind of say the same about Rust. Benefits aside, it's hard to imagine a more hostile language. Is it the language or the idea of the language people are thrilled about?
- jhasse 6y ago
  > [...] it's hard to imagine a more hostile language. C++?
  - bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y ago
    Hostile, but not more. C++ isn't completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades.
    - HideousKojima 6y ago
      >C++ isn't completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades. Neither is Rust, most of the things that seem weird or new in Rust already exist in functional languages.
    - wwright 6y ago
      I heavily disagree, as someone who uses C++ as my primary language at my job for the last three years, and who has a lot of experience in many other languages. It has developed a lot of idiosyncrasies that range from "confusing unique syntax" to "using these two features together will blow your app up with no warning from the compiler".
    - tene 6y ago
      I'm very confused by this claim. Rust's borrow checker is new, but everything else in the language is extremely familiar and recognizable to me from other languages I've worked with. Structs and enums are all over the place Free function definitions, and methods defined on a data type, are extremely common Rust Traits are ways of naming groups of operations to be associated with different types, and share a lot of similarity with Type classes, roles, interfaces, mixins, etc. present in many common languages async/await is similarly present in many common languages Generics / Parametric Polymorphism, extremely familiar from C++, Java, C#, etc. It's almost all modern takes on normal common PL things that have been in many languages for decades So by my perspective, I see a very normal imperative language, with its own take and small quirks on very familiar features, and the only feature I've been able to come up with that's "completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades" is the borrow checker. One new unique feature seems well within the weirdness budget of a new language. Could you expand a bit more on what it looks like from your perspective? What other features or properties of the language seem strange, alien, foreign, or otherwise completely unfamiliar to you?

yamrzou 6y ago

Interestingly, job priorities for men and women are not the same[1] : Men place higher importance on "Languages, frameworks, and other technologies I'd be working with", while for women, "Office environment or company culture" and "Flex time or a flexible schedule" come first. [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-most-important-job-factors https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-most-imp...

HideousKojima 6y ago
Another data point against the wage gap being a result of sexism
- 0xEFF 6y ago
  Except people who have flexible schedules are generally paid more.
  - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
    Working flexible hours when the company chooses the hours normally pays more but working flexible hours when you choose the hours normally pays less.
    - zerr 6y ago
      No, it means you're a consultant and charge premium.
- wwright 6y ago
  How do you tie this correlation to the negative of that causation?
- elliekelly 6y ago
  Women are more likely than men to adjust their work schedules in order to provide childcare[1] because we have entrenched gender expectations about who "should" shoulder what responsibilities in a heterosexual relationship. [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/01/women-more-than-men-adjust-their-careers-for-family-life/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/01/women-more-...

yamrzou 6y ago

> 52% of respondents think “Hello, old friend” when they search for a coding solution online and find that the first result link is purple because they’ve already visited the link. It's amazing how no solution has yet been found for this very real problem.

gitgud 6y ago

Wow I'm in the most popular demographic again! "White or of European descent: 68.3%" ...seriously though, how relevant is that racial statistic? Should we break it down by eye color? Hair color?... I think categorising people based on race does more harm than good...

michaelcampbell 6y ago
People evidently find it interesting. You did, enough to post about it, for example.
freehunter 6y ago
Racism and sexism is a constant complaint against the tech industry. But unless someone is actually compiling data on it, no one knows how bad the problem actually is (or if it’s actually even a real problem). Problems don’t get solved unless they’re being tracked.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  So what problem is being tracked by showing this statistic, exactly?
  - freehunter 6y ago
    Come on man, it was the first sentence of my comment.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Your first sentence was a generalisation. I still don't see how reasserting that somebody is white helps... anything related to the problems of racism and sexism, really. Help me here?
      - freehunter 6y ago
        I'm having a hard time assuming good faith based on your comments so I'm going to bow out of this conversation. I'd suggest you take some time to stop and think about why someone might want to track demographic statistics in a field that is constantly under fire for being dominated by young white men.

rmdashrfstar 6y ago

My tech stack: Rust, Redis, MongoDB, is most loved on Stack Overflow, and most hated on HN! That must be a good sign. :) Rust is a complete breakthrough in modern popular languages as a safe, fast, and expressive alternative. MongoDB, or really any aggregate-oriented database, is perfect when you’re modeling your domain as aggregates and you align your data access patterns with the design of these aggregates. Do your homework to set the right settings, take regular backups, then focus on what matters (hint: it’s not really persistence). Redis is a no-brainer, it’s just plain great for managing user sessions. There’s a place for everything, keep your mind open :) https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PolyglotPersistence.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PolyglotPersistence.html

evanriley 6y ago

What happened to Clojure? If I remember, it was in the top 10 for most loved language, and now I don't even see it mentioned anywhere.

capableweb 6y ago
Seems completely excluded, not even mentioned together with the rest of the JVM languages in the "How Technologies Are Connected". My guess would be that Clojure developers generally don't use Stack Overflow as much as others, so usage over there is low enough to not be a mark on their radar. Rest assure, nothing has drastically changed from last year, the same people who loved Clojure then, loves Clojure now :)

Xcelerate 6y ago

I’m a bit surprised Julia is ranked below Python for how much developers love the language. I’ve programmed extensively in both, and with Julia it’s an absolute joy, while I always feel like I’m fighting with Python to get it to do what I want (efficiently, at the very least).

KenoFischer 6y ago
Honestly, I'm pretty happy there were enough responses for them to actually call it out separately in the results. I'm not sure that was the case last year. Also, I think Julia's audience tends to not hang out on StackOverflow as much, since they're often scientists primarily and software developers second. Sure they use StackOverflow, but how many have an account and would answer a survey.
- s1t5 6y ago
  > Also, I think Julia's audience tends to not hang out on StackOverflow as much, since they're often scientists primarily and software developers second. My impression is the opposite. Julia forces you to think more about CS concepts early on (which is nice) while with Python or R you can get further by just figuring out the syntax for what you want to do and not worrying about how your code is executed.
  - KenoFischer 6y ago
    Sure, that seems plausible, but I still don't think that translates into the kind of user that would take the StackOverflow survey, which I suspect to mostly be users that are quite active on StackOverflow. More generally, I'm seeing StackOverflow metrics underperform on Julia compared to other languages (as opposed to things like Discourse usage for example).

axegon_ 6y ago

Rust still on top. Real shame there are so few Rust jobs out there. I agree, the language is still changing way too much but that is to be expected from a relatively new language. A lot of polishing has been done and imo, it's a production ready language at this point. Tooling is awesome, cargo is awesome, packaging is great. The compiler is still very slow, despite a lot of improvements on that front but that is to be expected given Rust's nature. Real shame it's so underused in the real world :/

skohan 6y ago
There are also not that many actual professional rust developers out there. I think there are a lot of developers who love the idea of rust, and are curious about rust, but I suspect the number of developers who have actually completed a rust project of meaningful complexity and deployed it to production is vanishingly small.
- dochtman 6y ago
  The metric used by Stack Overflow is "% of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it", so it seems likely to me are likely to have some understanding of what writing Rust code is like. You seem to equate "actual professional" with "meaningful complexity" or "deployed to production", which seems limited. I'm pretty sure I've written meaningfully complex code outside my day job -- and I would guess many open source developers write such code outside the context of their job.
  - dtech 6y ago
    Unfortunately, people have a tendency to not read the question well or just lie to support their favorite.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    If the question included the word "professionally", I think it would be a lot more meaningful.
6y ago

dahfizz 6y ago

Surprised to see JavaScript so low on the average salary by programming language[1]. Browsing HN you'd think that everything outside the browser is dead and long gone. [1]https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-what-languages-are-associated-with-the-highest-salaries-worldwide-united-states https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-wh...

quantummkv 6y ago
It's a classic case of supply/demand dynamics. There are a lot more JavaScript developers than demand so the prices are low.
- freehunter 6y ago
  As an anecdote, I am not a professional programmer but I was writing some code to solve a problem at work and when it got to the front end stuff I was told not to worry about it because they would just get a cheap contractor to build the front end. The backend needed to be written by an expert who knows the problem and understands the solution but the front end can be spec’d out and outsourced to cheaper contractors. I don’t usually live in the world of enterprise programming so I’m not sure how normal that is, but it definitely surprised me.
- hajile 6y ago
  There are tons of "Javascript Developers" who have no experience and about as much knowledge of the front-end. They usually make up the large crowd of "web consultants" that offer to make you a website for just $300 and then deliver wordpress with some skin they bought from somewhere. The web specs are millions of pages of legalese (and that's without mentioning things like WebGL which are handled by groups other than w3c). Learning all the stuff required for building a modern application on the web takes a long time. In addition, the incompatibilities and inconsistencies (between both browsers and browser versions) paired with the inconsistencies of much of the tooling and frameworks (though that has gotten much better in the past couple years) leads to a frustrating experience. If you need an actual web app and want to hire a knowledgeable developer who's willing to learn everything and not burn out from dealing with all the frustrating parts, it's very likely that you'll wind up paying more than for a back-end dev with similar amounts of experience.

champagnepapi 6y ago

"Formal Education Importance Almost 85% of the respondents that are professional developers feel that formal education is at least somewhat important, which is contrary to the popular idiom that you don't need formal education to become a developer. However, almost 16% believe that it is not at all important or necessary." Well as someone who doesn't have a formal comp. sci. education, this is a bit alarming for me. Personally didn't think the number was that high.

bbeekley 6y ago
Also as someone without formal CS education: I'm surprised too, though not alarmed. I've very rarely felt like I didn't have the right education to do my job at giantmegacorp w/ CS PhD coworkers. The bigger problem is that I feel a bit of a cultural outsider. There are jokes, stories, language that coworkers use and I'm just not familiar with. That can promote impostor syndrome and definitely affects interviews (eg "cultural fit").
entha_saava 6y ago
It is not about formal education itself though. Mostly 'bootcamp webshit' meme is - about those developers who don't know things like algorithm complexity or memory related stuff, working at a top level of a multi-layer stack leading to inefficient/bad code. The common consensus is it is pretty important for every developer to know some low level programming (C, asm) and algorithms/Data Structures stuff. Not so much about other things covered in standard CS curriculum.
Izkata 6y ago
As someone that was self-taught and then got a formal education (BS in CS), here's my explanation after having worked with new hires who only did bootcamps: Formal education is not necessary to be capable of doing the job, especially if you have some good people to learn from and are willing to learn on your own. However, it is very very good at filling in the things you don't realize you don't know. It provides a huge number of hooks in your mind you can investigate further as necessary on the job, as well as random little factoids you didn't know were important. For example, those bootcampers I worked with? Never encountered deep copy/shallow copy, and had trouble figuring out a bug caused by using shallow when it should have been deep. None of them had issues the moment it was explained to them, but they'd just never experienced it before, so had nothing to work from. Maybe they'd have figured it out and understood it eventually, or maybe they'd make guesses from StackOverflow and find something that works well enough without understanding why it works (so next time it comes up they're starting from scratch) (and yes, I have seen this). It's just lots of small things like this that make up that split (and a sibling comment mentions more of them). The survey was not well-structured to get this nuance.

pritambarhate 6y ago

It's interesting what Flutter has done for Dart! Before Flutter, I used to think Dart was dead. Typescript had won. If Flutter for Desktop becomes a viable option to create desktop apps, I think Electron will have a formidable competitor.

skoskie 6y ago
For the non-dart-speaking folks, what's flutter? Just a framework?
- quantummkv 6y ago
  Yeah. It's just a UI framework for Dart
- AnonC 6y ago
  > “Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for crafting beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.” [1] [1]: https://flutter.dev https://flutter.dev
- hajile 6y ago
  It's basically React-like components, but implements everything to target Skia rather than native or web. It's big interesting feature (to me) is that they added a native compiler so they can run on iOS (which forbids JITs). As a language though, Dart is MUCH better than Typescript. If you're going to go all-in on types, at least go with a decent type system rather than one who's core objectives explicitly do NOT include soundness. https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibility.html#a-note-on-soundness https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...
yagodragon 6y ago
Is Flutter/Dart the Ruby on Rails of UI development? I know it may put some people off that we have to use a completely new language to solve problems we've already (kinda) solved, but I believe this time google got it right. The ideas, execution, tooling, and community are amazing. Give it an hour and you'll love it

dvdhnt 6y ago

Honestly, it's hard for me to take anything meaningful away from this survey. For example, it groups technology as "web frameworks" that just are not equitable [e.g. rail != express != jquery != react] and compares things like react native to node.js [makes no sense]. Personally, this survey feels more like a marketing handout than anything else and I would take it all with a giant grain of salt if at all.

quantummkv 6y ago
There is actually one thing this survey represents very accurately. Hype. Especially in the programming languages/frameworks section.

dzonga 6y ago

one thing, I wish StackOverflow would show is framework | language use across geographic distribution. And one thing, I liked was the data on variation in gender between developers in different countries. though it was just a few countries.

yagodragon 6y ago

What's the matter with Perl? I don't remember seeing it anywhere near the top-paying programming languages the last couple of years. What happened this year?

ipnon 6y ago
I don't think anything has happened to Perl. Instead, the popularity of all its alternatives has exploded. edit: I can count the number of Perl scripts I have used at my job (0). I cannot count the number of Node and Python scripts I have used at my job (there are too many). The niche has been filled.
jeffbee 6y ago
It correlates strongly with tenure, which I imagine also correlates strongly with pay, so perl is transitively associated with money. I bet perl is also associated with SRE, the rarest and highest-paying role among these survey respondents.

amrrs 6y ago

Honestly, the detailed page https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 reads like a Stack Overflow Advertisement / Pushing than a normal survey highlights > When asked what steps to take when stuck on a coding problem, 90% of respondents indicated they visit Stack Overflow. > 0.3% of respondents had never visited Stack Overflow before taking the survey. > More than 40% of respondents reported that they are members of other online developer communities beyond Stack Overflow. > More than 15% of people find Stack Overflow at least somewhat more welcome than last year. We still have work to do, but it’s a start. A big difference from last year's page, if you check. Probably the effect of new CEO and bunch of new CTAs popping up everywhere about their paid tools!

apta 6y ago

> Participants’ responses regarding their sexual orientation are consistent with previous years. This is ridiculous. The left is going too far with identity politics. > For example, developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site. I wouldn't be surprised if this caused some outcry from a certain group of individuals since they will claim it "re-enforces gender stereotypes"

tryptophan 6y ago

Does anyone have any insights about why ASP NET Core is ranked so highly in the surveys? It doesn't get much discussion at all on HN. Is it just popular with 9-5 big-co dev jobs and their large numbers influence the survey?

isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
I'm guessing here, but SO has always been very .NET-friendly place (it runs on Windows and .NET, and it was very active in the .NET-related topics when it started) which might skew results a bit. But again, guessing.
akra 6y ago
IMO ASP NET Core/NET Core is actually pretty good; seems lighter weight than Java at least to me. Beats most web frameworks in terms of raw performance, comes with all bells and whistles (e.g. even Grpc is supported with a built in server) but bolted on only as required. i.e. definitely beats in performance many web frameworks today (e.g. Spring Boot, etc) with a bit more "officially supported" polish which can be important for adoption. The problem still is the traditional .NET conservative developer culture that I've experienced in .NET jobs IMO. It stops them from trying out the best things in their space (e.g. F# as one thing that comes to mind). NET Core as a runtime on a Linux platform is actually pretty good these days. This can vary by team and company however so not a reason to not choose the technology per se.

Vinnl 6y ago

> When we break down differences in years since learning to code by gender, we notice some retention problems. We see a big drop off at the 10-14 year mark when compared to men, though we've seen some improvement from last year's survey. This is consistent with other research that women leave tech jobs at higher rates than men. I'm sure that women leave tech jobs at higher rates than men, but hasn't there been a stronger focus on educating women for tech jobs in recent years as well? In other words, if more women have been learning to code in the past decade, then I'd assume that that also leads to a larger percentage of women in tech having learned to code more recently.