Roughly 90,000 individuals from everywhere in the world submitted their prime picks for instruments and programming languages they’re utilizing together with particulars about how lengthy they’ve been coding at work, college, and in any other case. With such a big response to our 2023 survey, it’s good to remember the fact that our responses are sourced from our tried and true Stack Overflow viewers, which implies the outcomes are biased in direction of a group of engaged coders which can be actively fixing issues. Try all the brand new insights on our outcomes microsite.
We additionally took a have a look at the true sentiments behind this yr’s surge in AI recognition. Is it making an actual impression in the best way builders work or is all of it hype? Head over to the weblog submit for a recap of the highest insights, however try Stack Overflow Labs for the deep dive particulars.
The instances, they’re a-changin’
For these which can be very early or very late of their coding careers, or simply favor different strategies of on-line studying apart from Stack Overflow, it’s protected to imagine we could also be under-indexing these of us. Our prime 5 key territories are the identical as earlier years with a slight shift during which nations are providing the highest variety of responses: the U.S. is persistently the primary nation for responses, however this yr we noticed India drop from the second highest response charge to 3rd place behind Germany. Over two years, we’ve got seen the responses from India drop 50% whereas responses from Germany have grown by 30%. Indian builders taking the survey this yr are skewing just a little youthful (89% underneath 34) in comparison with the age distribution of all respondents (62% underneath 34) so we could also be lacking responses from a section of extra skilled builders in India. General, the age distribution has moved barely older this yr with 37% of respondents aged 35 or older in comparison with 31% final yr.
Among the many prime ten programming languages this yr, we see three standard languages enhance their standing: Python, Bash/Shell (all shells), and C.
We all know from monitoring tags on Stack Overflow that Python has been rising in recognition for the final three years, and this yr it’s moved up one spot to take quantity three. Together with the rise in Python’s recognition, we persistently see Python libraries rank extremely in our standard “Different applied sciences and frameworks” part—NumPy and Pandas have been within the prime ten for the final three years.
C is an attention-grabbing language to see rise in recognition: it has not been within the prime ten for programming languages within the Developer Survey earlier than regardless of being round because the 1970’s. The TIOBE index has C because the second hottest programming language as of June 2023 and has engagement numbers near their primary language, Python. Provided that C is likely one of the hottest low-level languages, it’s the language of alternative in embedded programming inside IoT units, and it “powers virtually each technological expertise we’ve got” in response to Codecademy, it is smart that builders are utilizing C greater than ever this yr.
The extra standard a programming language is, the much less expertise on common we see reported from builders this yr (round ten years for our prime three languages, and nearer to 14 years for these languages reporting lower than 1% utilization). Much less skilled builders reporting increased utilization of some programming languages probably strengthens the argument {that a} decrease barrier of entry into the job pressure will increase their recognition amongst coders.
General, the baseline for wage progress in 2023 was 10% over final yr. When controlling for comparable years of expertise, we see a variety of progress and decline amongst the programming languages (as a lot as 42% progress and 69% contraction year-over-year). If we take a language’s recognition as a proxy for prevalence of builders within the labor market, then we may assume that salaries for standard languages will fall and fewer standard ones will rise. Our prime three hottest languages—JavaScript, HTML/CSS and Python—all noticed detrimental progress in median wage (starting from 5-10% contraction) whereas the three least standard languages we will match to comparable expertise—APL, Crystal and SAS—we see even much less wage progress (starting from 8 to 80% contraction). But when we have a look at the identical languages however alter for lower than common expertise (for instance, 5 years much less expertise than common per programming language), we see marginal progress for our prime three and double-digit progress for APL and Crystal (SAS was filtered from the outcomes for not having sufficient responses). What we surmise is that builders’ negotiating energy has been affected this yr and people with a couple of much less years of expertise and dealing in additional area of interest languages have extra wage upside this yr than builders with extra expertise in additional standard programming languages.
Get impressed by applied sciences admired and desired
This yr, we added a brand new part to the survey outcomes for expertise tendencies for many who have used or need to use programming languages, instruments, environments, libraries, and many others., that we’ve got dubbed “Admired and Desired”. Builders uncover new applied sciences through Stack Overflow or their community, blogs, on-line boards, and many others., and based mostly on preliminary analysis, wish to strive them out. As soon as a developer has had an opportunity to strive stated expertise out, what number of of them would nonetheless need to use it?
To raised gauge hype versus actuality, we created a visualization that reveals the space between the proportion of respondents who need to use a expertise (“desired”) and the proportion of customers which have used the identical expertise previously yr and need to proceed utilizing it (“admired”). For these with extensive distances between them (and the admired metric remaining on the bigger finish of the dimensions), we will infer that momentum generated by the hype grows with hands-on use. With shorter distances, we will infer that the hype is doing a lot of the heavy lifting so far as common recognition is anxious. For instance, we will see JavaScript, ranked as hottest programming language since 2011, has a comparatively quick distance between admired and desired (<10 proportion factors), whereas Rust, a best choice for builders who need to use a brand new expertise for the previous eight years, reveals a large distance (>60 proportion factors); Rust is a language that generates extra want to make use of it when you get to realize it than JavaScript. Seeing this progress in admiration for sure applied sciences offers us perception into what has endurance and what wants assist as a way to generate coveted evangelists to transform new customers into ones that can stick round.
Do admired applied sciences equate to monetary safety, as nicely? The highest admired programming languages (>70% who’ve used them previously yr need to proceed utilizing them)—Rust, Elixir, and Zig—all have 20% or extra increased salaries than the general median builders in 2023 (roughly $75K yearly). There’s actually not a direct correlation between salaries and the admiration issue since we see Python, TypeScript, and HTML/CSS all have admiration scores above 60% however solely make marginally higher annual salaries than the general median. Maybe a part of the devotion to a few of these standard and admired programming languages is the arrogance builders attain by having that decrease barrier to entry talked about earlier; programmers can turn into ample and employed with much less expertise and get the good thing about so many on-line assets and Stack Overflow solutions to assist proceed their studying course of.
We’ve got a video the place we take you thru our favourite highlights from the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. We began out making an attempt to make this a 10-minute video, however we had a lot to share…test it out right here.
Tags: developer survey
