The popular StackOverflow site has released the results of their developers survey. which includes some interesting information -even if it skewed towards web developers. You can read the complete results at http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016.
In this blog post I want to share some considerations about the data, well-aware that the self-selected audience is very much geared towards web development or (to be more precise) full-stack developers (30%) while only 7% claim to be "desktop developers" -- which is RAD Studio core audience.
The most popular language is JavaScript, which is not surprising given the focus, although it is also the most popular back-end development technology, way ahead of Java and PHP. The developers age and their experience is also a bit different than those in our surveys, and varies quite a bit by country. Roughly 50% of the developers who answered (or, maybe, who had time to answer) have less than 5 years experience as developers and in their 20ies; also a large percentage (45% has a site reputation below 100). This is more of a reflection of the StackOverflow users than of the developers at large. My impression is older developers favor different online communities, if any, but this is really a side issue.
Looking into the actual data, with JavaScript leading and JavaScript libraries on client and server side (Angular.js, Node.js) on the rise, it was nice to see that while Delphi was not listed as an option, it was the most typed entry in the "others" category, with over 650 respondents typing the tool name:
A trend I've seen discussed online is the fact that developers using OS X are growing over those using Linux, a result probably influenced by the fact taht a Mac is needed for iOS development. Windows remains by far the OS most used by developers (around 50%). A fun fact is that VisualBasic also wins a catecory, that for the most dreaded technology. One think I wasn't too happy to read is that the most popular development environment is... Notepad++, but clearly given the web developer audience editors have a more higher role than IDEs. Delphi gets a "write in" mention also in this category.
Finally, I could not avoid noticing the age distribution of the Star Trek fans vs. the Star Wars fans. I would probably have been interesting to correlate age also with developer technologies, but this is what we have:
