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Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

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Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#131

Post by bostand »

douche wrote: post #25
SiVal wrote: post #14

I'm surprised to see "platforms" as Win: 41%, Desktop Linux: 33%, Mac: 18.4%. Presumably this question was about the machine you use to develop software on. The reason I'm surprised has nothing to do with any advocacy. It's just that whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference in the US (Web, for example), it looks as though fewer than 1/5 of the machines are NON-Macs, while the answer to the question above…

StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them, and they use StackOverflow hard. [1]…

Have you considered maybe you are living inside a bubble?

After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#132

Post by stephenr »

dagw wrote: post #107
stephenr wrote: post #104

I can't find the actual questions, so if anyone can reference them it may help to understand the answers more. The "platform" part is at best ambiguous and at worst white noise. It covers mobile & desktop OS's, "cloud" providers - both IaaS like AWS/Azure & SaaS like Salesforce - hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, buzzwords like "Serverless" and mainframe. Apparently all of those things represent a "pl…

I'm pretty confident actual Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than anything else. I think that question was multiple choice. My guess is that most sysadmins use their favorite language and a bit of JavaScript when they have to, and since they all have different favorite languages javascript ends up 'winning'

> most sysadmins use their favourite language and a bit of JavaScript

I think more likely is that every nodejs developer considers themselves "devops".

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#133

Post by bostand »

z3t4 wrote: post #92
SiVal wrote: post #14

I'm surprised to see "platforms" as Win: 41%, Desktop Linux: 33%, Mac: 18.4%. Presumably this question was about the machine you use to develop software on. The reason I'm surprised has nothing to do with any advocacy. It's just that whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference in the US (Web, for example), it looks as though fewer than 1/5 of the machines are NON-Macs, while the answer to the question above…

Nice to see Linux Desktop so high. Are we entering the era of Linux Desktop ?

This is surely the year of Linux on desktop :)

more seriously, once you get the hang of it Ubuntu machine is just ridiculously more productive than win and osx.

I'm surprised that not more devs are using it.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#134

Post by thehardsphere »

markatkinson wrote: post #3

It is weird being a "desktop application" and mobile developer and knowing that 70% of developers do something that I am completely unfamiliar with. Web development to me feels like the Boneyard from the Lion King. This shadow land that I am too terrified to enter into, and I have no idea why I feel this way. It also bugs me like it might be a huge shortcoming at some point in my life that I have no grasp of it.

I made the switch a few years ago from working primarily on Desktop apps to primarily Web apps, and beforehand I had this exact feeling.

In my experience, web apps are way, way easier than Desktop apps in almost every way, aside from maybe if you have to figure out scaling really big (which you probably don't most of the time). You can probably learn everything you really need to know about web apps to clear that spooky feeling just by working at a new job for a month or two. It's not a huge shortcoming at all in reality, because at the end of the day, software is software. You can write software, so you'll be fine and may already be better than people calling themselves "web developers."

Also, I don't know if this applies to you, but in my case part of the reason I had this spooky feeling was because the people who I knew who called themselves "web developers" before I actually started doing "web development" were not very skilled, and were inclined to portray it as Magic to other people, so that they could they could feel the satisfaction of being a sort of Arcane Web Magician. Plus, it was magic to them, because they didn't really understand it. If you have people like this around you, I suggest you ignore them and, if you need support, find people who are able to explain details clearly to you without presenting it as magic, or at least point you towards resources that can. Once I was able to do that, it made a big difference in my confidence in my own abilities and helped me improve as a professional tremendously.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#135

Post by raulk »

The "languages over time" section [1] is overrepresenting Javascript. It shows separate charts for JS and node.js, when the latter is not a language but a runtime environment.

I would love to see the chart for Go instead of Javascript twice.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-la...

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#136

Post by steveklabnik »

Kiro wrote: post #123
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #62

I think there is severe bias in their results simply because of the content in stack overflow and the people that visit. For example, the data on a lot of developers only having 1-3 years of programming experience. That would naturally follow that a majority of active users on a Q&A site would not have much experience, right? Same can be said for data about what technologies are represented - JavaScript was at the to…

I agree. Anecdotal but I used to visit SO all the time during my first years as a programmer compared to now where I only need it occasionally. It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question.

> It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's about your experience, that is, as more and more questions are asked and answered, it is more likely that an answer already exists, so you don't need to ask a new question.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#137

Post by sidlls »

SiVal wrote: post #14

I'm surprised to see "platforms" as Win: 41%, Desktop Linux: 33%, Mac: 18.4%. Presumably this question was about the machine you use to develop software on. The reason I'm surprised has nothing to do with any advocacy. It's just that whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference in the US (Web, for example), it looks as though fewer than 1/5 of the machines are NON-Macs, while the answer to the question above…

Yes, you are missing something big: the majority (by far) of development work is done on Windows or some Linux platform these days and has been for a long while. In fact, outside the Bay Area I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of developers I ever saw using a Mac. The valley and certain developer "scenes" have a huge overrepresentation of Mac users.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#139

Post by erikb »

About the "ship it (optimize later)" point: The interpretation seems to completely opposite to the data. It seems most people seem to disagree with it.

It's also most reasonable from experience. Everybody experience stuff that is supposed to be optimized later but then never gets revisited until it's rewritten completely 20 years later (again with the idea to just ship it of course).

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#140

Post by douche »

bostand wrote: post #131
douche wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them, and they use StackOverflow hard. [1]…

Have you considered maybe you are living inside a bubble? After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

> After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

That couldn't be further from the truth... I love slinging C#, it's far and away my favorite. It doesn't have that HN hot-shit cachet that Go or Rust or Scala or Lisp-likes or ML-variants have, however.

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