Top Developer Tools of 2016

https://stackshare.io/posts/top-developer-tools-2016

by olalonde • 10 years ago

177 66 10 years ago

mgutten5• 10 years ago

Didn't expect to see this on HN today. I helped run the analysis, so feel free to direct any questions about the methodology my way!

johnsmith21006• 10 years ago

Good read and thanks for sharing.

matart2• 10 years ago

How did you source the information? There are primarily web development tools on the list.

msarchet• 10 years ago

Of course, the price of JavaScript comes with the hundreds of dev tools needed to launch a simple "Hello World" app.

In node this is as simple as console.log('Hello World')

sapeien• 10 years ago

Should qualify this as Web Developer tools. Nearly all of the things here would be irrelevant to systems programmers.

jordache• 10 years ago

web development more popular

ohyoutravel• 10 years ago

JavaScript, Python, PHP, and HTML are developer tools? (yes, they're listed in four of the top ten spaces of Application & Data Tool of the Year) Isn't that like saying the #1 business tool is "The English Language"? I guess I expected a list of things people use like this one (which is phenomenal):

"Scott Hanselman's 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows"

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDev...

Arzh5• 10 years ago

Yeah you can call the language a tool, since most languages can get the same job done but some do certain jobs better.

ysavir3• 10 years ago

JavaScript has consistently beaten out any other language as the client-side language of choice in both my personal and professional projects. Clearly, it deserves the top spot.

minimuffins• 10 years ago

The results are in, folks, and The NUMBER ONE programming tool of the year IS:

The general purpose computer! Let's hear a round of applause!

The article reads like an ad for a bunch of commercial services. I was really hoping for things I could apt-get/brew install <excellent new tool>.

SkyMarshal• 10 years ago

Unfortunately general purpose computing appears to be dying, slowly but surely. Talos recently wrote a good survey of the problems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361389

sean_patel• 10 years ago

Isn't that like saying the #1 business tool is "The English Language"?

This. Love it! Exactly my thoughts on seeing the click-baity OP.

gglitch• 10 years ago

I'm not missing the point of your satire, but I'd love it if more people considered language arts a powerful tool worth mastering to an advanced degree.

ProAm• 10 years ago

Really its the IDE or text editor that you should master, what you put into it is just icing on the cake.

acobster• 10 years ago

I also really like how Atom, Sublime Test, and Vim are "DevOps tools."

Philipp__• 10 years ago

Vim is, the rest, hardly.

whatever_dude• 10 years ago

I have to agree. This list is either terrible, or it has terribly named categories comparing unrelated technologies to each other.

zwieback• 10 years ago

Great list, wrong name, should be something like "top 50 _web_ developer tools. Not much in there for desktop app developers.

mattnewton• 10 years ago

Well, even that seems the wrong name. Is it worth writing an article saying php, angular, react, and _JavaScript_ are popular in web development in 2016? I guess it's worth knowing that they still are?

mgutten5• 10 years ago

Since we aggregated data across all users, our "web" tools definitely shone through (as you might imagine, there are more web devs than native on stackshare), but given that we included all tools we felt it was more accurate as a description of the methodology.

Do you think it would be valuable for us to segment these rankings further next time? Create a couple different rankings?

ysavir3• 10 years ago

Sure. It's not so much about splitting it up, though. It's about providing a title that will attract the correct audience. But good luck getting that past marketing.

SteveMoody73• 10 years ago

If the list is for all development work then i must be doing something wrong. I only use 5 of the listed "tools". Github, Gitlab, Vim, Python and Sublime Text.

These top lists lately always seem to focus on web development and seem to skip the millions of developers who work have never written a web app. Desktop, Embedded and backend apps may not be as sexy as the latest web framework but do run a huge number of businesses and devices in the world.

matart2• 10 years ago

My guess is that they source this based on web searches and social media posts. Those tend to have a more web development focus.

xwowsersx• 10 years ago

I'm genuinely curious what the value of stackshare is. Is it a form of "infotainment"?

It seems to me that if you work as a developer professionally, you'll have a good sense of what tools and stacks are out there based both on colleagues/work and the larger developer community you likely interact with. How does it help me to see that some well-known software is popular? It seems like just encourages more trend-following in programming.

I suppose I could see the benefit when it comes to SaaS products...this site gives a way to see all the options out there for things you might want to outsource.

Am I missing something? Do people find this site to be valuable?

ohstopitu• 10 years ago

I personally use it to keep up with new tools that companies might use or are becoming popular (always good to have an eye to know what's up).

I don't use it when I want to start a project and I'm looking for tools.

This is a keep at the back of your head kinda thing.

criddell• 10 years ago

The #1 new tool of the year is a library for adding chat to a project. Why is chat being added to so many things?

Every time I use Evernote and see the chat button, I wonder if anybody is actually chatting in Evernote and if they are, why?

lojack• 10 years ago

Absolutely 100%. The only time I ever call a company for support is when they don't have chat. My company provides both chat and phone support to our customers (many of whom aren't technically savvy) and chat is overwhelmingly more used. Support staff can also handle more throughput with chat since you can easily have 5 simultaneous conversations at a time.

Outside of analytics, real time chat is almost always the first non-core feature I ever add to a new project.

skinnymuch2• 10 years ago

OP is talking about chat as a feature in a product. You're talking about something completely different - customer support chat.

meow_mix• 10 years ago

Not sure how this was judged... Seems silly to list jQuery, React, and Javascript... If jQuery, React etc is on there obviously JS is too? They should really break down the numbers.

And what is meant by trending? I assumed this was judged by people hiring for the technology but they list Node as being a top-trend yet on their website Rails has more job openings than Node... Seems weird.

mgutten5• 10 years ago

Originally we thought the same thing, but we wanted to remove as much bias from the analysis as possible, so we opted to keep all tools in the running. Since the weighted rank was based heavily on tech stack inclusion, we felt it was more valuable to keep the raw rankings.

For trending, we calculated tech stack growth over the past 6 months for each tool. I wish we had time to pull in job data, but the data pull was going to delay the article a while and there are some core features we were itching to get at (there's only 6 of us on the team). Not saying this is a perfect list, but it's a snapshot of the data we have and felt it was a good indication of what developers/teams are using.

epmatsw• 10 years ago

Kite looks intriguing, but sending every keystroke to a remote server is a bummer

sergiotapia• 10 years ago

Last I heard they will offer a on-premises solution for companies that need it. However without being connected to the hivemind, I imagine it's utility will suffer. :(

It's a great idea though!

Unbeliever69• 10 years ago

Difficult to take this seriously.

ohitsdom• 10 years ago

Surprised Visual Studio Code didn't get a mention in the text editor section.

Arzh5• 10 years ago

I'm guessing they can't pull their head out of github to know that it is the better version of what atom is trying to do.

mgutten5• 10 years ago

Actually, the reason Visual Studio Code didn't make these rankings is because the stackshare page wasn't created until mid-2016. Since the rankings were heavily weighted to tech stack inclusion, VSC's numbers were a bit skewed. We do our best to keep up with requests to add tools, but as you could imagine there are _a lot_ of requests.

daveguy• 10 years ago

Well, this did point me to a shared password system with an API that I have not seen before: passbolt [https://www.passbolt.com/]

I have been looking for something like this for a while to securely access and share credentials from an application. GPL makes me nervous though -- especially AGPL. Does AGPL prevent you from using it as a service from within a separate program? For example, if OAUTH was AGPL would no one be able to use "sign in with google/facebook/etc" without open sourcing their software?

waisbrot• 10 years ago

Probably not, but it depends on exactly how the code is arranged.

AGPL says that anyone who can use your code (via web service) counts as having the code "conveyed" to them, which means the GPL terms apply.

The purpose of this is to stop cases where I put GPL-derived code on a smart TV but say that since I don't let the TV owner touch the code I don't have to open source it. Or I wrap GPL-derived code as a web service and don't offer the source because the GPL'd code stays on my server.

In your example, maybe Facebook takes some AGPL OAuth library and adds 20 lines of code to talk to their database. If they now give you access to call their OAuth service, they must honor a request from you to look at those 20 lines of code. If the OAuth library that you use to talk to Facebook is also AGPL and you give someone access to your service, then you have to release your source to them.

Arzh5• 10 years ago

Man I dislike all of their top picks, I guess I'm just old now adays.

mgutten5• 10 years ago

Nahhh, the _most_ important thing is to use what works for you and your project. Any time you don't do that->eventual regret

spo81rty• 10 years ago

One of the top NEW tools should definitely be Prefix. It was released early in 2016 and is now used by over 10,000 .NET and java developers. It is a lightweight profiler that tells you everything your code is doing.

http://stackify.com/prefix

imafish• 10 years ago

So web development is the most popular field of software engineering. Makes you kind of sad.

ralmeida• 10 years ago

Or it's the most popular field among the StackShare users, which is likely.

nkkollaw• 10 years ago

So, their product is #1?

How convenient...

brink• 10 years ago

Their product isn't even on the list, mate

opvasger• 10 years ago

"isomorphic javascript"... I thought we had moved past that :(

BigChiefSmokem• 10 years ago

Top 10 Developers?

Don't know any of them. I must not be in the right inner-circles (I'm guessing web development judging by this list). That reminds me, do we still consider Carmack a top developer?

throwanem• 10 years ago

They're apparently the top 10 contributors to Stackshare.io.

tyrannoflorist• 10 years ago

Node.js:

"Look to an even stronger showing in 2017 as a language-of-choice for multi-threaded, scalable applications."

lol

ess3• 10 years ago

Now that's just sad...

quickben• 10 years ago

It is very hard to take this list seriously as 'visual studio' isn't even mentioned anywhere. But 'vi' is? So, Vi is a top dev tool, but the default Microsoft dev tool isn't worth the top list?

Another issue. Go to githut.info, Java is second by wide, but it's not 'top'?

The list seems detached from reality and residing in its own bubble.

rpcope1• 10 years ago

Additionally no mention of Eclipse or IntelliJ products, which seems a little strange, considering how much I see these everywhere.

kodisha• 10 years ago

Items missing:

- IntelliJ IDEA

- John Carmack

seagreen• 10 years ago

Since this list doesn't actually make any sense, I'll list two actually great developer tools:

+ The Stack package manager for haskell: https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/README/

+ NixOS: https://nixos.org/

Note that NixOS' drive towards critical mass isn't complete yet. It has great Haskell support (especially since Stack has nix integration), but may not have as good support for your language. No point in switching OSes before the time is right.

manigandham• 10 years ago

This list makes no sense. Expected better from a site that's focused on tech stacks.

FLGMwt• 10 years ago

Since we're agreed this is iffy, I'll add mine:

-Visual Studio Code

-yarn

-serverless

Top Developer Tools of 2016

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