The State of Developer Ecosystem 2020
This report presents the combined results of the fourth annual Developer Ecosystem Survey conducted by JetBrains. Feedback from 19,696 developers whom we surveyed in the beginning of 2020 helped us identify the latest trends around tools, technologies, programming languages, and many other exciting facets of the development world.
Key Takeaways
Java
is the most popular primary programming language.
JavaScript
is the most used overall programming language.
Websites
are the most common type of application developers work on.
Web (Backend)
is the most popular platform.
Go, Kotlin, Python
are the top 3 languages developers are planning to adopt or migrate to.
Python
has overtaken Java in the list of languages used in the last 12 months. It is the most studied language. In the last 12 months 30% of respondents have started or continued to learn Python — even more than last year.
Programming languages
Do you plan to adopt or migrate to other languages in the next 12 months? If so, to which ones?
By primary languages
What are your primary programming languages?
Up to 3 languages
Typescript is growing steadily. It has progressed from being used by 12% and being the primary language for 1% in 2017, to 28% and 12%, respectively, in 2020.
On which operating systems are your development environments?
For which platforms do you develop?
What types of software do you develop?
Including apps in any programming language, for either professional or personal purposes
What types of software do you develop?
By primary languages
Which platforms do you target with your projects?
This question was only shown to developers who develop for desktop platforms.
Do you contribute to open-source projects?
Mobile
Mobile questions were only shown to respondents who develop for mobile.
For which mobile operating systems do you develop?
Native tools remain the most popular solution for mobile development. They are used by two thirds of mobile developers. Additionally, half of mobile developers use cross-platform technologies or frameworks. Among these frameworks, React Native is still the most popular and is used by 42% of mobile developers.
Which cross-platform mobile frameworks do you use?
This question was only shown to developers who use cross-platform technologies or frameworks.
The popularity of Flutter has increased over the last year, as its share has grown by 9 percentage points. In the same period, the shares of Cordova, Ionic, and Xamarin declined by roughly 10 percentage points each.
Which of the following components do you use in the mobile app you are currently developing?
This question was only shown to respondents who are currently developing mobile apps.
Big Data
Questions in this section were shown to respondents who had checked “Data Analysis”, “Data Engineering”, or “Machine Learning”) in question “In which kinds of activities are you involved?” or “Data Analyst / Data Engineer / Data Scientist” in question “Which of the following best describes your job role regardless of the level of your position?”.
A lot of them, as you can get from their answers, don’t need any big data tool for their work.
Which Big Data analytics platforms do you use?
Most data analytics do not use any specific platform.
Which big data tools do you use?
What Spark version do you use?
Where is most of your data hosted?
Which statistics package(s) do you use to analyze and visualize data, if any?
Find the right tool
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