Developers prefer Rust, Python and TypeScript to JavaScript, according to 2019 Stack Overflow Global Developer Survey

DevOps specialists and site-reliability engineers are where the big money is made, suggests Stack Overflow

The Stack Overflow Global Developer Survey 2019 has found that Python remains the fastest-growing programming language among developers, overtaking Java for the first time.

The most-used languages are JavaScript (used by 67.8 per cent of devs), HTML/CSS (63.5 per cent) and SQL (54.4 per cent) with Python rising to 4th place with 41.7 per cent.

The Stack Overflow survey features the languages actually used every day by more than 90,000 developers around the world, providing one of the most accurate snapshots of how IT pros spend their working days.

However, JavaScript is far from the most popular developer tool. The "most loved" language is Rust (83.1 per cent) followed by Python and TypeScript - Typescript being in particularly acute demand at the moment, according to recruitment site Hired.

The most popular operating system for coding on is (predictably) Linux with 53.3 per cent, but only just - Windows is close behind with 50.7 per cent. Perhaps most notably, though, the container platform Docker is a comfortable third at 31.5 per cent.

The most dreaded language is Visual Basic for Applications or VBA (75.2 per cent) followed by Apple's Objective-C (68.7 per cent) and Assembly Language (64.4 per cent).

More than half of the respondents to the survey claim to have started writing code before their 16th birthday, with men generally starting earlier than women. Some 45 per cent of respondents, meanwhile, claimed to have less than 10 years of coding experience.

Developers in the UK, US and Australia were among the oldest average demographics in the survey, with the average age of the UK developer 32.2, just behind Australia and the US with an average age of 32.8. The youngest are in India, with an average age of 25.9. India is also the country with the youngest average age that developers started learning to code.

And if it's money that a developer is primarily after, then DevOps specialists and site-reliability engineers are among the highest paid, according to the Stack Overflow survey.

Computing and CRN have united to present the Women in Tech Festival UK 2019, on 17 September in London.

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