Eighty-seven percent of Rust developers said that they want to continue using the language. 

Rust also tied with Python as the most wanted technology in this year’s report, with TypeScript and Go following closely behind. The distinction between most loved and most wanted is that most wanted includes only developers who are not currently developing with the language, but have an interest in developing with it. 

Looking beyond programming languages, Docker and Kubernetes took the top spot for most loved and most wanted tools. Docker was loved by 77% of its user base and Kubernetes by 75%, and 37% want to use Docker and 24% want to use Kubernetes. Last year, Docker was wanted by only 30% of developers. 

In addition, 69% of professional developers view Docker as a fundamental tool, which is up from 55% last year. 

The number of developers learning to code online is also increasing, which may not come as a surprise. The percentage of people learning to code online has increased to 70%, up from 60% last year. The percentage of people who learn to code at university or college is 62%, according to the survey. 

The survey also explored employment status, and found that 69% of respondents are employed full-time, which is an increase of 4% since last year. There was also an increase of 5% in freelance or self-employed developers, up to 15%. 

In addition, only 15% of developers work on-site full time. Forty-three percent are fully remote and 42% are hybrid. Smaller organizations with 2-19 employees are more likely to be in-person, while large organizations with over 10k employees are more likely to be hybrid, according to the survey. 

To learn more, read the full report.

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The development profession is full of new developers. Over 50% of respondents indicated that they have been coding for less than 10 years and more than 35% have been coding for less than five years.  

Coders are also starting out younger. The most popular age range for a person to write their first line of code was 11 to 17, with 53% of responses. Fourteen percent of respondents wrote their first line of code between the ages of 5 and 10, and 24% wrote their first line between 18 and 24 years old.  

The survey also indicated that the pandemic has influenced work status for many developers, and a greater percentage of respondents now work part-time or are in school. The percentage of full-time developers has decreased in the past year. 

“This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment,” Stack Overflow wrote in a blog post explaining the results of the report. 

JavaScript remained the most commonly used programming language for the ninth year in a row. This year Python surpassed SQL to become the third most popular language. 

React surpassed jQuery as the most commonly used web framework, with 40% of developers using it. JQuery was used by 34%, Express by 23%, Angular by 22%, Vue.js by 18%, and ASP.NET Core by 18%. 

AWS was the dominant platform among Stack Overflow users, with 54% of respondents using it. Following AWS was Google Cloud Platform at 31.05% and Microsoft Azure at 30.77% — nearly tied.

Other popular tools developers used include Git (used by 93%), Docker (48%), Yarn (17%), and Kubernetes (16%).  

Stack Overflow surveyed over 80,000 respondents for the survey. More information is available here. 

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“Prosus is one of the world’s leading technology investors with stakes in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU’s, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, Remitly and Udemy.  Their massive scale and reach improves the lives of around a fifth of the world’s population. Prosus’s mission is to build leading companies that empower and enrich communities, as demonstrated by the many community-focused and EdTech companies they work with. This makes Prosus the perfect company to acquire Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow the ideal investment in their focus on the future of workplace learning and collaboration,” Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, wrote in a post. 

Chandrasekar went on to explain that the acquisition will provide the company with more resources and support to grow its platform on a global level. For instance, it sees deeper partnerships, international expansion and M&A opportunities in the future. “Our intention is for our public platform to be an invaluable resource for developers and technologists everywhere and for our SaaS collaboration and knowledge management platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge,” he wrote.

According to Prosus, it decided to acquire the developer community because of its popularity within the developer and technologist community, as well as for the company’s knowledge management and collaboration solution Stack Overflow for Teams. 

Larry Illg, CEO of EdTech at Prosus stated: “With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest growing segment of corporate learning and development. As an operator of businesses across 90+ countries, we understand the needs of technologists and developers, particularly in high-growth markets. In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”

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“The open source ethos that is foundational to this network was an inspiration for our new free offering. We’re excited to enable those who are working towards a common goal to develop a collective knowledge base. I truly believe those in our technology community will find value from our free, private environment,” Teresa Dietrich, the chief product and technology officer at Stack OverFlow wrote in a blog post. 

Meanwhile, the Basic plan now includes the ability to use single sign-on (SSO) without changing the current price. 

Saltworks and Secure Code Warrior team up on secure coding 
The partnership will elevate the importance and accessibility of secure code education and skills development and to further AppSec programs for global enterprises. 

Saltworks helps organizations build AppSec programs from policy to production and Secure Warrior is a developer-centric learning solution that helps developers secure coding proficiency. 

“Not only does Secure Code Warrior take a human-led approach in teaching and motivating developers to code securely, but it also drives training adoption throughout the development organization by providing positive skills-based pathways for developers in the language and framework of their choice,” said Dennis Hurst, the founder and president of Saltworks. “Both are proven to increase developer speed, accuracy and productivity.”

Camunda raises approximately $100 million
The open-source company Camunda announced that it received around $100 in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners.

Camunda enables companies to design, automate and improve businesses processes end-to-end while increasing business agility. It also allows organizations to overcome legacy roadblocks of digital transformation and to enable processes across different technologies, systems, infrastructures, people and devices. 

“Camunda was founded on the premise that making it easy for business stakeholders and developers to automate and improve business processes would have a transformational impact on organizations. Today’s funding underscores the tremendous value Camunda’s process automation software is providing to our users and customers every day,” said Jakob Freund, the CEO and co-founder of Camunda. 

Apache weekly updates
Last week at the Apache Software Foundation saw the release of Apache XMLBeans 5.0, which now includes partial method generations and the ability to remove inner factory classes. Apache XMLBeans enables developers to access the full power of XML in a Java-friendly way. 

Other new releases include Apache NiFi 1.13.1, Avro 1.10.2, Log4j 2.14.1, HttpComponents Core 5.1 GA.

 A vulnerability was found in OpenMeetings CVE-2021-27576 in which bandwidth could be overloaded with public web service. Users are urged to upgrade to the latest version. 

Additional details on all of the latest updates for Apache are available here.

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“We’ve heard from our users that the inability to say “thank you” is frustrating—especially for new users who don’t have enough reputation to upvote or comment. Even when users gain these privileges, they still want to say ‘thanks,’” Stack Overflow wrote in a post.

The company said they hope this addition reduces friction for users whose comments are deleted, reduces burden on moderators, and minimizes the time active users spend on flagging and deleting comments. 

Windows Subsystem for Linux updates
This includes three new updates in the new Windows Insider Preview Build 20150: GPU compute and the new commands wsl –install and wsl –update.

GPU compute support spans support for NVIDIA CUDA, which will help enable professionals to use their local Windows machines for inner-loop development and experimentation, according to Microsoft. 

With the new WSL update, the Linux kernel that is used by WSL 2 distros is now being delivered via Microsoft Update. 

Additional details are available here.

Xamarin.Forms 4.7
Xamarin.Forms 4.7 includes new features and improvements. 

With simplified grid row and column definitions, users no longer have to specify each column and row definition separately. 

The addition of multi-binding allows users to connect a target property to a list of source properties and then apply logic to produce a value with the inputs specified.

The new release also includes experimental support for shapes and paths. 

Additional details are available here.

New Google Assistant tools
The new tools include the Actions Builder and Actions SDK that will help developers build custom voice apps and services, according to Google. 

Actions Builder is a web-based IDE that lets you develop, test, and deploy directly in the Actions console.

The addition of Intents and scenes let users define robust NLU training data and behavior for specific conversational contexts. 

Additional details are available here.

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Rust was followed by TypeScript at 67.1%, Python at 66.7%, Kotlin at 62.9%, and Go at 62.3% for most loved languages.  

Rust continues to be the most loved programming language because it “solves pain points present in many other languages, providing a solid step forward with a limited number of downsides,” Stack Overflow explained in a post.

RELATED CONTENT: Microsoft turns to Rust for safer code

Additionally, Python’s continuous rise seemed to end this year as TypeScript pull ahead. Last year the two languages shared second place, but according to Stack Overflow TypeScript came ahead due to Microsoft’s change of direction and embrace of the open source movement. TypeScript also polyfills many ECMAScript changes (like arrow functions, async, and classes) before they’re widely available in browsers. Go made significant gains, moving up to 5th place from 10th last year. 

Meanwhile, VBA, Objective-C, and Perl hold the top spots for the most dreaded languages—languages that had a high percentage of developers who are currently using them, but have no interest in continuing to do so. All have over 70% of users dreading the language. 

For Python, 30% of developers who are not developing with the language have expressed interest in developing with it, well above any others. 

As for frameworks, the survey found that ASP.NET Core is the most loved web framework, beating out React.js this year. Gatsby, a newcomer on the survey, is already sitting at 5th, being loved by 60% of the respondents. On the other hand, the most dreaded frameworks included Angular.js, Drupal, jQuery, ASP.NET, and Symfony.

.NET Core and Torch/PyTorch remain the most loved of the other remaining frameworks, libraries and tools. 

Meanwhile, Linux remains the most loved platform, followed by container technologies Docker and Kubernetes. 

Taking a look at database technologies, Redis remains the most loved, followed by PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch.

The survey also found that 80% of respondents believe that DevOps is at least somewhat important, and 44% work at organizations with at least one dedicated DevOps employee.

The reasons for this trend include consumers’ expectations for their apps and services to be available at any time and any place, Stack Overflow stated in a blog post.

Engineering managers, Site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps specialists, and data engineers remain among the highest paid individual contributor roles in that order. All earn a median salary of or above $125k in the United States.   

The survey was conducted before the COVID-19 lockdowns and found that more than 75% of developers said they work overtime at least occasionally, meaning one to two days per quarter, while  25% work overtime 1-2 days per week or more.

In terms of workplace diversity in software development, the difference in representation from previous years did not change significantly. 

“There was an uptick in some race and ethnicity groups, while other races and ethnicities remained similar or decreased. Similarly, we saw a slight increase in female-gendered respondents, while non-binary, genderqueer, or non-conforming remained the same,” Stack Overflow said. 

The 2020 Developer Survey was conducted in February of this year with participants from nearly 65,000 developers.

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“Developers often search for relevant code examples on the web for their programming tasks. Unfortunately, they face two major problems. First, the search is impaired due to a lexical gap between their query (task description) and the information associated with the solution. Second, the retrieved solution may not be comprehensive, i.e., the code segment might miss a succinct explanation. These problems make the developers browse dozens of documents in order to synthesize an appropriate solution,” the researchers wrote in a paper.

To address this, CROKAGE aims to take the description of a programming task as a query and then provide the relevant code snippets and explanations so that developers can easily use the code in their projects.  

In order to develop CORKAGE, the team trained a word-embedding model with FastText using millions of Q&A threads from the website as “the training corpus” and expanded the natural language query to include unique open-source software library and function terms. 

According to the team, CROKAGE outperformed six baselines, including the state-of-art research tool BIKER, and produced better results than BIKER in terms of relevance of the suggested code examples, benefit of the code explanations, and the overall solution quality (code + explanation).

“A combination relevant code and corresponding explanation is very likely to help a developer understand both the solution to their problem and how best to implement that code in practice,” Ben Popper, director of content at Stack Overflow, wrote in a blog post. 

However, Popper added that CROKAGE still has some limitations, if the query is poorly formulated, the tools will not suggest on how to improve the query. 

“Like any other search tool, the results, though encouraging, are not perfect,” Popper wrote. “The team is still investigating other factors that could not only help find higher quality answers, but also improve the synthesized solution offered up as a final result.”

The solution is limited to Java queries for now, but the researchers are looking to have an expanded version open to the public soon. More information is available in the original paper. 

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The QA company released an analysis of 11 of the most popular languages on the website, which revealed that JavaScript is the language with the most questions asked, with 1.7 million total questions. Following behind are Java (1,511,813), C# (1,283,449), PHP (1,260,491), and Python (1,107,683).

The company believes that JavaScript tops the list because it has such a wide range of use cases. “If you work in any way with the internet, chances are you’ll need to know a bit of JavaScript,” Global App Testing wrote.

The JavaScript topic with the most questions was jQuery, a popular JavaScript framework.

However, if you look at the data over time, Python is becoming the most questioned language. And as of this year, it has surpassed JavaScript in terms of questions asked. “Either Python is fast becoming the most popular programming language, or Python just has a bigger proportion of new coders compared to other languages,” the company wrote.

Python is frequently used by data scientists, and some of its frequent questions are related to data processing libraries, such as “pandas” and “dataframe.”

Python is also a fairly general-purpose language and is involved in many areas of development, which explains the popularity of searches around the Django web development framework, Global App Testing explained.

“Each programming language has over time been geared toward — or was even designed for — a particular niche within tech. R is to data science as Swift is to iOS development as C++ is to video game development. This explains some of the differences in the types of problems that arise. This explains why we see “database” a commonly questioned concept in SQL but not, for example, Objective-C,” the company said.

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“By and large, developers just want to get on with their work,” said Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow. “Our Teams platform not only allows developers to quickly find the answer they need to keep working, but it also allows them to share their own knowledge internally, increasing the expertise and productivity of their teams.”

With Stack Overflow for Teams, teams can search the platform for answers as well as edit or crowdsource answers so that it remains up-to-date. The platform offers unlimited private questions and answers; an intuitive archiving feature to go deeper into a subject; member profiles to showcase user’s specific skills and topics; and integration within the workflow.

“Ask and answer questions about all those proprietary, top-secret things that you can’t post to a public audience and create an accessible set of knowledge that you can come back to time and again. (No more having to re-answer the same question over and over again in chat!)  It uses the same Q&A format, organization, and experience that you know from SO to help your team easily capture, organize, and find information,” Alex Miller, vice president of operations at Stack Overflow, wrote in a post.

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According to the company, the index draws from over 8 billion data points across five sources that are selected based on their popularity with the developer audience. Sources include GitHub, Stack Overflow, Google AdWords, YouTube, and Google Search.  

“Business leaders can only drive innovation in their companies if they have a pulse on the most powerful and upcoming languages, tools and frameworks and if they have the right skills on their teams to use them,” said Nate Walkingshaw, chief experience officer at Pluralsight. “The Pluralsight Technology Index serves as a comprehensive source for evaluating which technologies and skills CIOs need to invest in.”

The top ten in-demand developer languages, tools, and frameworks in order are: Java, HTML, C++, JavaScript, Blockchain, jQuery, C, CSS, C#, and Arduino.

The next 10 in demand are Android Development, Python, Salesforce, PHP, MySQL, Angular, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Spring, SQL, and Node.js.

According to the company, the index will be updated monthly and an expert analysis of the rankings will be published on a quarterly basis.

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