The annual Stackoverflow survey is here and as JavaScript continues to take over, TypeScript has surpassed Java to rank in the top five most widely used programming languages.
Microsoft’s JavaScript superset is slowly creeping up the rankings: It was seventh most used in 2021, up from ninth in 2020, and languished at 12th in 2018. In the latest study, it was fifth.
Interestingly, despite TypeScript’s popularity in use, affection for the technology declined. Rust continued its run as the most loved language (87 percent of developers wanted to continue using it), but TypeScript dropped from third to fourth place when Elixir jumped from fourth to second in 2021.
Also notable in the 71,547 responses related to programming languages was another switch between Python and SQL. In 2021 Python pushed SQL as the third most used language. This year SQL regained third place, just behind second place HTML/CSS.
And the most hated…
Unsurprisingly, developers still fear that tap on the shoulder from the finance department for tweaking that bit of code on which the entire company depends. Visual Basic for Applications and COBOL still lurk in the top three most feared technologies.
The operating system ranking had changed little: Windows won for personal and professional use, although Linux for professional use passed macOS in second place with 40 percent of responses, compared to Apple’s 33 percent. Most notable was the growth of the Windows subsystem for Linux, which now accounts for 14 percent of personal use, compared to just 3 percent in 2021.
The Stackoverflow team introduced a new category for version control systems this year, and unsurprisingly, Git got a whopping 94 percent of responses, with the second-placed SVN managing a paltry 5 percent. Worryingly, while the majority of those learning to code used Git for version control, a disturbing 17 percent said, “I don’t use one.” Definitely something to add to the curriculum.
As in 2021, AWS was the most popular cloud platform, though Microsoft’s Azure swept away second place from Google Cloud. But wannabe programmers dropped the pros’ preferences in favor of Heroku, which took the top spot. Google Cloud came in second, and AWS and Azure came in fourth and fifth respectively.
Salaries are up
And salaries? They have been increasing since 2021. Survey respondents reported that median salaries have increased by about 23 percent on average. The big winners included COBOL, where the median annual salary rose from $52,340 to $75,592.
Microsoft continued to dominate in developer tools, with 74 percent of 71,010 respondents using Visual Studio Code, up slightly from 2021’s 71 percent. While still in second place, usage of the fuller Visual Studio declined. slightly from 33 percent to 32 percent, while IntelliJ and Notepad++ were pretty much neck and neck in third and fourth place respectively (a trade from 2021.)
To show that there is still life in the old dog, .NET topped the “other frameworks and libraries” category, although NumPy was preferred by users learning to code. Stackoverflow decided to move Node.js from the “programming, scripting, and markup languages” category to the more appropriate “web frameworks” category in 2021, where it took the top spot over React.js with 47 percent of 58,743 respondents using it. used compared to 43 percent used React.js.
As for the survey itself, it came from developers in 180 countries (but not those under US sanctions) and, as in 2021, respondents who spent less than three minutes on the survey were thrown out. Due to additional questions, the median time spent was even just over 15 minutes.