A list of developer surveys

Posted on Edited on In Disqus:

When I’m looking for numbers in my recent research, I need reliable surveys/market share statistics in computer technologies. So here is a list of them:

1. StackOverflow Annual Developer Surveys

Link: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey

By StackOverflow, this annual developer survey questioned thousands of developers who are using StackOverflow. The methodology is transparent. The results are open. The oldest survey was in 2011.

More interestingly, they present the survey result of each year in an excellent report that you can view online. For example, below is the result of 2020.

stackoverflow

If a respondent spent less than 3 minutes in the survey, their responses are not included.

One thing that I liked about this survey is that it split the result between all respondents and the professional developers.

2. The State of Developer Ecosystem

Link: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2020/

By JetBrains, the company behind IntelliJ IDEA, PyCham, WebStorm, Rider, ReSharper, etc.

Pretty much like the SO survey, this one provides data about the trending programming languages and operating systems.

At the beginning of the result, a “Key Takeaways” section concludes the most important outcome. The survey also tells what languages developers plan to adopt/migrate.

The oldest dataset was in 2017.

The State of Developer Ecosystem

3. Developer Economics survey

Link: https://www.developereconomics.com/resources/graphs

You will need to register for an account to view the result

This survey is the only survey on the list that requires an account to see the result. Good thing that there are two reports each year, in Q1 and Q3. The participants were also rewarded with points that can be used to cash out with vouchers and draw.

This survey’s most helpful information is the most popular programming languages in technology like Web, Data Science, Machine Learning, Desktop Application, etc.

The oldest dataset was in 2010

developer economics

4. GitHub Octoverse

Link: https://octoverse.github.com/

This one is not precisely a survey but an analysis of GitHub data on open-source projects. The result is more focused on the communities and social aspects of developers in open-source.

This analysis is new. Only data for 2020 is available.

octoverse report

5. TIOBE Index

Link: tiobe index

TIOBE index is a number (in percent) count for +"<language> programming" on search engines.

The number of hits determines the ratings of a language. The counted hits are normalized for each search engine for all languages in the list. In other words, all languages together have a score of 100%.

The dataset is not free. Yet you could click on each programming language in the result to see the entire history (of that language), starting from 2001.