The 2021 edition of Stack Overflow’s developer survey features both substantial changes in the landscape while other elements have remained stubbornly resilient.
In a blog post, Stack Overflow’s Ben Popper and David Gibson wrote:
“This year’s survey was a little different than ones in years past. We opened our 2020 survey in February, and by the time we got around to publishing the results, the reality of work and daily life had shifted dramatically for people around the globe.
The pandemic continues to exert a strong influence on the shape of our economy and society, so we tried to keep this year’s survey shorter and focused on things outside the traditional office.”
So, with that in mind, to the findings…
One of the highlights from this year’s report is that React.js (40.14%) has overtaken jQuery (34.42%) to become the most-used web framework. Completing the top five are Express (23.82%), Angular (22.96%), and Vue.js (18.97%).
React.js (25.12%) also leads the most-wanted web frameworks, followed by Vue.js (16.69%), Django (9.21%), Angular (8.47%), and Svelte (6.57%).
Although it just makes the top five most-wanted, Svelte (71.47%) is tied with ASP.NET Core as the most-loved web framework. FastAPI (70.04%) is second on the podium, followed by most-wanted framework React.js (69.28%), Vue.js (64.41%), and Express (62.07%).
Three of the most-loved web frameworks also appear in the top five highest-paid: Svelte, ASP.NET Core, and React.js.
Unfortunately, none of these take the highest spot which goes to Ruby on Rails ($77,556). Svelte ($62,520) takes second place, followed by ASP.NET Core ($60,744), Gatsby ($60,129), and React.js ($58,128).
Our own “most impressive” award has to go to the shiny new web framework Svelte that manages to feature highly in the most-wanted, most-loved, and highest-paid lists. Given more time, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it accelerate into the most popular web frameworks.
Both professional developers and all respondents report JavaScript (64.96%) as being, by a healthy margin, their most-used language. Second place goes to HTML/CSS (56.07%), showing that web development continues to dominate.
Python (48.24%) traded places with SQL (47.08%) for third-place when including all respondents but remained in fourth-place when accounting for just professional developers.
Impressively, Python has retained its spot as the most-wanted language for the fifth year. Rounding out the top five are TypeScript (15.29%), JavaScript (14.59%), Go (14.54%), and Rust (14.09%).
While in fifth place in most-wanted languages, Mozilla-founded Rust (86.98%) keeps its crown as the most-loved language for the sixth consecutive year. Behind Rust are Clojure (81.12%), TypeScript (72.73%), Elixir (72.11%), and Julia (70.69%).
Python (67.83%) just falls out of the top five most-loved programming languages.
Coding in a language you love can also pay off, with both Clojure and Elixir appearing in the top five highest paid languages. In fact, Clojure developers are, on average, raking in the biggest annual salaries ($95,000).
That salary is over $14k more than the second-highest that goes to F# ($81,037) developers, followed by Elixir ($80,077) and Erlang ($80,077) which tie third-place, Perl and Ruby that tie fourth ($80,000), and Scala ($77,832) which completes the top five.
Notably, Perl was the highest paid language last year.
The most commonly-used database is MySQL (50.18%), followed by PostgreSQL (40.42%), SQLite (32.18%), MongoDB (27.7%), and Microsoft SQL Server (26.87%).
While there are no databases that developers overwhelmingly “love” when compared to languages, Redis comes out on top (70.71%) and is closely followed by PostgreSQL (70.40%) that represents the first commonly-used database to also appear in the loved list.
MongoDB (60.28%) – another commonly-used database – takes third place. Elasticsearch (56.70%) and Firebase (56.22%) complete the top five.
Developers working with DynamoDB ($80,936) are making the biggest bucks, followed by Elasticsearch ($67,021) and Cassandra ($64,090). Developers’ most-loved database, Redis ($64,548), takes fourth place. Finally, IBM DB2 ($64,044) rounds off the top five.
By a wide margin, AWS (54.22%) unsurprisingly remains the cloud platform to beat in usage. However, Google Cloud (31.05%) and Microsoft Azure (30.77%) made substantial gains over last year.
However, if we’re talking about wide margins, nothing comes close to the margin Visual Studio (VS Code in particular) enjoys in IDE usage. Visual Studio Code leads the pack (71.06%), followed by Visual Studio (33.03%), Notepad++ (29.71%), IntelliJ (28.74%), and then Vim (24.19%).
You can delve into the full results of Stack Overflow’s latest survey here.
(Photo by Gvantsa Javakhishvili on Unsplash)
