My Insights from Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020

There are a plethora of programming languages and web frameworks used by software developers all around the world.

You may have heard that Python is the most popular programming language in the Data Science Community or that JavaScript Frameworks are more popular among web developers or Linux is the most widely used operating system by the developers.

Did you ever have this question in mind whether all these statements made are true or not. If you had this question in mind then you came to the right place. Lets together fact check these statements by analyzing at the the data from Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020.

The data contains questions related to multiple aspects of software development and general preferences of developers from all around the world. Some of these questions are:

“How important is the practice of DevOps to scaling software development?”

“How frequently do you learn a new language or framework?”

Part 1: Widely Used Operating System

The question for this part was:

“What is the primary operating system in which you work?”

Here we can see the most widely used operating system by developers sorted by their usage in 2020.By looking at the bar graph we can see that Windows was the most widely used operating system followed by MacOS ,Linux and BSD.

So there may be a chance that Linux is popular among developers but still Windows is the widely used by developers at work.

Part 2: Popular Programming Language

Here we analyze the languages developers desire to work in the next year (which shows an expected growth in that particular language) with the actual growth of the language in those years. The Question was:

“Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?”

From the graph we can see that Python was indeed the most popular choice among developers. JavaScript was so close to beat Python but lost by a very little margin.

Part 3: Popular Choice for Web Frameworks

Here we analyze the web frameworks developers desire to work in the next year (which shows an expected growth in that particular framework) with the actual growth of the language in those years. The Question was:

“Which web frameworks have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?”

Here we can see that most of the developers are interested in learning JavaScript based frameworks like React.js, Vue.js and Angular. No other frameworks were even close in the race.

Conclusions:

In this article, we analyzed the 2020 Stack Overflow’s Developers’ Data. Following are the major insights that can be concluded from the analysis:

1. Windows is the most widely used operating system by developers at work.
2. Python and JavaScript are the most popular languages among developers during these years. Python is one of the few languages that is becoming increasingly popular among the developers.
3. Developers are very much interested to learn JavaScript based frameworks like React.js, Vue.js and Angular.

To see the code and additional analysis, see the link to my Github repository here.