Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

stackoverflow.com

21–30 of 171 posts

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#21
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…

I'm in the camp of "I do all my serious work on a PC, but I take a MacBook to conferences because it's light and has good battery life".

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#22
Shows you effects of the echo chamber you are in, as I was very surprised that Scala was only at 3.6%, and beaten by Go at 4.3 and Swift at 6.5% in the programming language section.

The self-selection of people I follow on Twitter, the meetups and conferences I attend, the choice of companies and colleagues I have worked with, etc, probably just reinforce my blinkered echo chamber. This is probably true for many Haskell, Rubyist, Go people and others as well.

By heart, I would have guessed 20% Scala usage, but in my head, I do know of the floods of javascript misuse across the world, the legions of java developers in every country and location, having been one myself once. And I guess my current location of London which I feel use Scala more than most places and mixing a lot with startups does affect my expectations of what everyone else use elsewhere.

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

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#24
post #6
post #5

Just learned that: Most Popular Languages by Occupation For Sysadmin / DevOps no 1 is JavaScript For Data Scientist / Engineer no 1 is JavaScript

This is a little bit misleading. This was a multiple choice question, so it's understable that most people have used JavaScript in some way within their projects. This doesn't mean, that JavaScript ist the most used language in those categories by the time spent using it.

That was my takeaway too. If you ever had to change a spelling error in the front-end of a devopsy-style tool, then chances are you wrote some javascript, and bam: top of the list.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#25
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] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen...

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#26
post #8

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.

With me it's the other way around. I can do almost anything I need with Web tech. Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the last century. I'm doing a native mobile project next month, and looking at the stuff a iOS dev needs to get going is horrible.

As a web dev these days I feel like we have it the easiest:

If you want to do mobile, try making it a PWA. If it needs to be in the app store (which these days I often see portrayed as more of a necessary evil than something desirable) go hybrid. If hybrid is too slow, try React Native or NativeScript. All of these can build on your existing knowledge of web technologies.

If you want a desktop app, you probably don't actually want a desktop app anyway, so just build a decent web app. If you need something that runs outside the browser, use Electron. Or React Windows if you only target the UWP.

If you want to build something on the server-side, there's of course Node.js. If you want something more tightly integrated with the database try ArangoDB. Again, same language you already know.

There are still niches where you need the raw performance of specialised programs written in other languages than JS, of course, but they are growing smaller. It's basic economics: if you can hire two full-stack JS devs instead of one iOS, Android, Windows and back-end dev each, you can cover the same technologies with half the salaries. This is especially true if the specialists end up doing mostly busy work because you don't actually need their specialised expertise all the time.

Few companies can afford to have all these dedicated specialists on the team but they may still want to cover multiple markets (e.g. an app for desktop and Android). In this case going for the web is the obvious choice for the smaller budget. The alternative would be hiring multiple contractors or outsourcing the project to a company that has the resources to provide all of the needed specialists all the time.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#27
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…

There was a while a few years back where a MBP running Windows 7 was one of the better* laptop choices out there.

The last two teams I've worked with have all had Macs, even though at least half the team were writing .NET in Windows.

Then there's my main personal laptop which couldn't get the latest Mac OS so I just wiped it and installed Linux. I wouldn't do that to my daily work machine though, too many little things just don't work quite correctly, but all in all it installed pretty easily and runs less sluggish than OS X did.

* Better as in good hardware, consumer appeal, and a relatively performant and stable machine for getting work done. Not necessarily best value or gaming, etc.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#28

Javascript and Java reign supreme. No trendy wanky languages like the ones mentioned on here all the time will ever be up there. Companies just pretend they "use go" to attract the trendy people here, when in reality "use go" means "there was a project once that we used go for" and 99% of their code is javascript and java.

Not sure if trolling or... but fwiw at Stack Overflow's SRE team we use Go a _lot_. We just open-sourced our latest tool written in Go, DNSControl (https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/), and we have dozens of internal tools and software written in Go.

Not to mention other open-source tools like Grafana, InfluxDB, or Cockroachdb.

I agree with you that Java and JavaScript will reign supreme for years to come. Just pointing out that not all of us think that's a good thing, and there is plenty of variety out there, in the real world.

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#29
The "Years of coding experience" statistics are interesting in a number of ways IMHO. Is there an interpretation why it doesn't go down linearly, but has up and down micro-cycles? Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding experience just an artifact of not assessing answers with over 20 years of experience at finer granularity?

Re: Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

#30
post #26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With me it's the other way around. I can do almost anything I need with Web tech. Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the last century. I'm doing a native mobile project next month, and looking at the stuff a iOS dev needs to get going is horrible.

As a web dev these days I feel like we have it the easiest: If you want to do mobile, try making it a PWA. If it needs to be in the app store (which these days I often see portrayed as more of a necessary evil than something desirable) go hybrid. If hybrid is too slow, try React Native or NativeScript. All of these can build on your existing knowledge of web technologies. If you want a desktop app, you probably don't…

Sure.

There are many ways to leverage your Web knowledge, you don't have to start from zero.

But it's still a chore to do mobile development.

I want to build a iOS app, because 80% of the potential customers are iPhone users, but in the future I want to use as much of the code on Android. So its Hybrid or React-Native.

So I thought, well Expo sounds nice, and gives me a Web like dev experience without the need to set up a Mac OS system.

Then I checked if they support AirPlay and HealthKit and the answer was "detach".

So now I'm back to "regular" React-Native and have to setup a Mac to get started.

Well, at least it seems running a dev VM for Mac OS isn't big of a deal anymore :\

Post reply on HN