The results of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017 are live. Some surprising highlights for me:
- Most developers surveyed are white male web developers. Just kidding, this was not surprising at all.
- More than 50% of developers’ parents had a university degree of some type. I wonder what the parent’s education level is like for other occupations?
- SQL is the 2nd most popular programming language. Surprising to me because I don’t think of SQL as a programming language. Not sure why. Maybe because you don’t run a SQL application but an application that uses SQL. Guess I have to change my thinking.
- Most dreaded language is VB6 which is what I started my professional career with. Not sure why people dislike it so much. Maybe it has more to do with the fact most VB6 projects are old and it’s hard to get a VB6 development environment setup.
- The most dreaded platform is Sharepoint, which is something I’ve never liked and actively avoid. Glad it’s not just me.
- Visual Studio is a very popular IDE but the second most popular was Notepad++. I assume that everyone has Notepad++ installed on their workstation. Unless you are a sysadmin then you like Vim. Don’t forget to quit Vim it’s Esc-q or Esc-wq if you want to save and quit.
- Most developers outside of the United States are underpaid when you translate their salary to USD. I wonder if this is because of the currently strong US dollar and if the difference wouldn’t have been so high 5 years ago.
- Git won the version control war over Mercurial despite me personally liking Mercurial better. Surprisingly Subversion is used more than Mercurial.