Stack Overflow User Survey Results

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/01/2012-stack-overflow-user-survey-results/

by jncraton • 13 years ago

91 53 13 years ago

blog.stackoverflow.com

simfoo• 13 years ago

> Most popular programming languages: jquery

Yeah, that's what StackOverflow has become.

danabramov2• 13 years ago

Yeah that was weird but you can argue it has become a kind of DSL for DOM manipulation.

Yes I know it's not a language per se but because many questions request answer specifically in jQuery and not vanilla JavaScript, 84% JavaScript questions have jQuery tag and only 39% of jQuery questions have JavaScript tag, I think it's pretty fair to include it as a language of its own.

I don't think they cared about pedantic at all.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

The info-graphic cheekily dissolves into an ad, which I guess is OK given the context.

I'm surprised to see JavaScript as the most popular language, but pretty pleased.

Living in New Hampshire I don't have many programmer friends, so communities like StackOverflow are important to me. Relatively new additions like the SO JavaScript chatroom[1] help too.

It may not feel like a community in the traditional sense to some, but in a lot of ways StackOverflow gives me the encouragement I need to help people, practice my craft and keep learning.[2] It really means a lot to me (and I'm sure a lot of others).

Also, note that the tiny link below the info-graphic has the raw data if you want to take a look at all the numbers[3].

[1] http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript

[2] http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png

[3] https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=vU4rF_2bPVQaftSo1s69...

B-Con3• 13 years ago

JS is #1, and JQuery is #3. That's a runaway win by the JavaScript stack.

ajross2• 13 years ago

Note that the "win" is less about language-vs-language and more about environment. Fifteen years ago, you saw Java score a similar rapid "win" over C++, which is gave up more slowly to C# over the following decade.

What this really shows is that (1) most programming is "IT" programming (i.e. focused development for specific businesses), (2) most IT programming is user-focused, and (3) we've seen a rapid shift in the customer's preferred UI environment.

Java was a revelation for people developing client software in the 90's. It was faster and easier, and in many cases could be deployed over the web. Its later wins on the server backend (which came more slowly) were driven by the client side.

And Javascript is taking that mantle, driven by the mobile world. Yes, you could still develop a Windows client app, but it won't work on your employees iPhones and Galaxy S3's. So you deploy a web app instead.

And thus you use Javascript.

jbigelow76• 13 years ago

Of all places I'm surprised SO would consider jQuery a language separate from Javascript, an aggregate with a footnote would seem more appropriate.

Not a big deal it just seems odd to me. At least they didn't put HTML up there :)

peeters• 13 years ago

Yeah, Javascript must be really confusing to have so many people asking questions about it :-).

I jest, but seriously, popularity of a tag on StackOverflow should be used to determine one thing: popularity of a tag on StackOverflow. There are more important factors influencing a subject's popularity on SO than its overall popularity. A big factor is where the community around the technology tends to congregate. Many projects (like Guava: http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/) officially endorse StackOverflow as the place to ask questions, because the maintainers and experts will be monitoring SO. That will have an inflating impact on its relative popularity.

JonoW• 13 years ago

To be fair, positions 1, 2 and 3 (JavaScript, SQL, jQuery) are "common" languages in that most web developers use/need them in addition to their core server language/framework (apart from node.js of course).

thetrb• 13 years ago

Interesting to see that "Other Europe" is so high with 16.7% of respondents, especially since they have the biggest European countries listed out separately. My guess is that this shows the large number of developers in Eastern Europe.

ProblemFactory• 13 years ago

"Other Europe" is actually just slightly under-represented, not overly popular. All the small countries are pretty big when put together.

Europe has a population of 595M, UK+France+Germany+Italy is 269M, or 45% of Europe. On StackOverflow, the big countries account for 54% of all European respondents.

eric-hu• 13 years ago

These numbers are not mutually exclusive. The caption for that graph is "% of respondents who have worked with a particular language".

Some high percent of developers in a web company have most likely worked with Javascript. Let's say it's 70%, then that's (roughly) 70% of developers who work with Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP, and ASP.net, among others. This is also true of SQL, which is the number 2 result.

robmcm4• 13 years ago

I wonder if the "popularity" of a language is related to the fact people are learning it.

More people could be developing in Java, but more people are learning JavaScript and therefore active on Stack Overflow.

I generally find I use Stack Overflow a lot lot more when I am picking something up for the first time.

Therefore I would assume JS is the language that is being most actively learnt.

heelhook• 13 years ago

Not necessarily IMO, considering it still does make sense to ask questions even "after" you've learned a language, as long as you are using a language/platform and continue to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, you are bound to have questions. Wouldn't it be boring otherwise?

B-Con3• 13 years ago

Sure, but the number of questions you have in the first 3 months of the language are bound to be more than the number of questions in the second set of 3 months, and far more than after you've used the language for 3 years. Granted most of the questions you have when you're "younger" won't require you to actually ask as you can find answers, but I'd be surprised if the number of questions asked by a user is relatively constant over the first several years of having learned a language.

robmcm4• 13 years ago

I tend to see SO questions as being rather simple, such as why doesn't this API work, or what's wrong with my Syntax or what does this stack trace mean.

When you are more advanced your questions become more architectural and harder to convey in text.

Perhaps that’s just me…

pnathan• 13 years ago

That also harmonizes with my experience learning a language.

dljsjr3• 13 years ago

I participated in the survey, and I don't expect anyone from SO to actually read this posting on HN, but I did find that it was extremely biased towards the idea of people who work places actually ship software based products/services, and it was also extremely biased towards people that work on the web (see the "what are you most excited about" category, which was mostly web-based technologies).

I'm a software developer by day, and I work with a team of around 20 or so other developers. But we don't ship products or create for the web. We're a robotics research laboratory, rooted pretty squarely in academia and non-profit. The closest we ever get to a "product" is a public YouTube video demo or a publication and a conference talk.

I do a little bit of web/app stuff on the side, for fun, but I took the survey from the perspective of my professional programming life, which is my day job.

I know that people like me are in the minority, and that web dev/app dev is where the growth is right now, but it seems a little silly to skew a survey like this away from "people who write software in the general case" because then you aren't really creating a survey of all StackOverflow users. I actually found it a little challenging to answer some of the questions accurately. Seeing how they tied their results so strongly in to their Careers product makes the layout of the survey self-evident in hindsight, but I was a little unsatisfied with the survey itself regardless.

robmcm4• 13 years ago

What language do you use stack overflow for?

dljsjr3• 13 years ago

I use SO in a lot of different ways. I enjoy looking for questions that I can answer in any of the languages that I have experience with. I also use it as a simple search engine for inspiration; if I have an implementation task I'll often search SO first with some of my ideas to make sure I'm not reimplementing the wheel. All of our development at the lab is in Java, which I've been using for about 4 or 5 years on-and-off, so I don't often find myself asking a lot of "how do I do this?" syntax or technicality questions when it comes to the day job stuff; it's usually a cursory search for details or an algorithmic type question.

As far as actually asking questions, I've been on SO for a few years so I've used it for a lot of different things over time. I used it when I was first getting acclimated with C and Java outside of class projects, and now I use it whenever I'm picking up a new pet language. I've been asking and searching a lot about Haskell lately.

okhudeira• 13 years ago

I think the lighthouse image for 'Good management', number 3 under 'What's important to programmers when evaluating a job opportunity', is spot on. Really conveys that good management should provide very clear direction.

On a side note, I'm not sure why jQuery is listed as a programming language.

rcirka• 13 years ago

Why is jquery counted as a language? Javascript is a language, jquery is a framework.

salmanapk• 13 years ago

haha in-joke.

duiker101• 13 years ago

Programming language...jquery...

eliben• 13 years ago

The "satisfaction %" heart graphic made me chuckle. The 1.4% growth from 2010 to 2011 doesn't seem like a big change in heart size, but the 0.8% between 2011 and 2012 - that deserves a huge heart.

Even when produced by trustworthy sources like SO, statistics can mess with your brain.

shocks2• 13 years ago

Why only where US developers live? What happened to the rest of the world?

jakub_g• 13 years ago

Yep it would be interesting to see also international data (someone also posted a question about European data in the blog comments).

There are interesting stats on Alexa regarding SO (don't know however how reliable they are): http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com Click "Traffic stats", then "Stackoverflow.com’s Regional Traffic Ranks".

Interesting to see SO being 22nd most popular site in India while ranking 166th in the US, and only 363rd in China.

ColinDabritz• 13 years ago

The graphic is more US Centric, but at the bottom they link to the raw data: https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=vU4rF_2bPVQaftSo1s69...

This breaks down some major countries/regions of the world nicely. (e.g. US 37.7%, 'Other Europe' 16.7%, UK 9.6%, India 7.6% on down)

eli• 13 years ago

Considering the answer is mostly a list of the most populous states, it's particularly not useful.

shocks2• 13 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1138/

scorcher• 13 years ago

I really don't think 2.2% increase in happiness during two studies is statistically significant. Especially given the user base increased by over 300% in that time so presumably the demographic will have changed. Still, clever use of information to promote their site. Its amazing how fast stack exchange has grown.

donretag2• 13 years ago

"You like us…you really like us!"

The problem with this statement is that the survey is based only on SO users. Non-users cannot comment whether or not they like the service.

Sincerely,

A StackOverflow non-user

EvanKelly• 13 years ago

Do you make a concious decision to not use StackOverflow for a particular reason or is it simply not a tool you need?

donretag2• 13 years ago

StackOverflow is simply a tool that I do not need.

It is not a community site, it is a Q&A site. Too formal. I find it far better to ask a question on a specific mailing list and not on SO. It causes fragmentation and I prefer to have one canonical source of information. Rails question? Ask the mailing list. A community site for developers would be welcome.

Another big problem that I have with SO is moderation. I do not want anyone editing what I have wrote. It would be fine with the occasional editing of egregious errors, but SO moderation is out of control (IMHO).

kenjagi• 13 years ago

Judging from those results I think that the original question was more "what if" rather than "what is" - particularly in the salary area.

In 10 years here in the Washington DC area I've never seen salaries that high, or employers that can actually deliver that.

forgotAgain• 13 years ago

While I appreciate the information, the ad made the whole thing cheesy.

Zarathust2• 13 years ago

One metric I would have liked to see was whether people were more or less able to find _good_ answers to questions. A lot of times my questions are answered with "you shouldn't do that" and usually, I know that it is bad, but turn to SO for tricky stuff. I can't change things like the build process or build scripts easily at work for example, I want to know how to adapt to it instead of getting told me how wrong I am.

I mostly code in C/C++ and the number of meaningful answers to my questions has declined over the years. Maybe I don't ask stuff as trivial as I used to but I just can't accept as many answers as I used to, despite community's pressure to "work on my acceptance rate". I end up accepting the answer that helped me the most, even if it was very little help.

DenisM• 13 years ago

I would like to see a survey about people's being (un)happy with the current moderation regime, as I have a few bones to pick with it and I don't think I am alone:

1) Some very useful questions such as "what framework would you recommend for parsing CSV in .NET" get closed as "subjective, possibly leads to arguments", whereas they already have a dozen of very useful answers. Had the moderators got there on time, I would not get the info I wanted.

2) Short answers get auto-converted into "comments", so they can not longer be marked as actual answers, even if they are the correct answer.

3) Answers consisting mostly of links to other SO questions with a brief explanation get deleted because "they don't add value". I can't show you them because they got deleted (duh!). That other question/answer might have provided useful context and discussion, or it could actually be the good answer; besides the link itself is valuable as it links two related questions together... In their zeal moderatos actually delete useful information from the system.

4) Security questions overwhelmingly have dangerously wrong accepted answers. SO should admit the shortcoming and ban all security questions (other than pen-testing).

Basically, SO risks becoming another wikipedia with deletionists ruling the roost.

junto• 13 years ago

The following website doesn't inspire confidence, but without doubt, FileHelpers 2.0 is the most awesome .NET library out there for processing and creating CSV files: http://filehelpers.sourceforge.net/

Oh, and its free thanks to the hard work of Marcos Meli.

danabramov2• 13 years ago

"SO should admit the shortcoming and ban all security questions (other than pen-testing)."

You can comment on answers and even suggest your own.

blinkymach12• 13 years ago

The "Where do developers live?" chart wasn't particularly satisfying[1], so I thought it would be interesting to look at developer population in proportion to the total population reported by the 2010 census[2].

After doing so, Washington and Massachusetts come out on top. California is #6.

Full details in this google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ak1kLptmHteHdEV...

Briefly:

Washington

  2.15% of total population, but 5.3% of developer population. Ratio of 2.47

Massachusetts

  2.04% of total population, but 4.7% of developer population.  Ratio of 2.3

...

California

  11.91% of total population, but 14.9% of developer population. Ratio of 1.25

...

I threw the spreadsheet together somewhat hastily, so apologies in advance if you catch a typo.

[1] http://xkcd.com/1138/ [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo...

lorenzfx• 13 years ago

why is Stack Overflow still IPv4 only? Are they hosting on Amazon?

Stack Overflow User Survey Results

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