Developers tend to be the types of people who don’t take well to distractions during their working day. But one exception to this rule seems to be the developer survey, for which the IDE is happily minimised and all meetings cancelled. For once, developers’ opinions are valued and listened to carefully, although the questions pertain only to all things code and technology. Eventually, of course, things get back to normal, and the dev team sinks into the quiet oblivion of noise-cancelling headphones.
The best known of the annual developer surveys is the Stack Overflow survey, which, for many years, has been the oracle of trends, preferences and thoughts from those IT professionals whose work effectively shapes the way human life proceeds.
The Python Developer Survey from the Python Software Foundation is a more specialist affair than its more encompassing cousin from Stack Overflow and is a joint project between the Foundation and JetBrains (producers of several developer IDEs). Given the current popularity of the Python language in large language models, data science and machine learning, the survey’s findings present a bigger picture that’s of interest outside the confines of the DevOps department. Python is an integral (some might say unavoidable) part of working with what is termed AI, so the findings of the survey could have a wider impact on the spread of the over-hyped technology across the enterprise.
Python developers continue to find opportunities
The survey comprises the answers given by over 25,000 Python developers from close to 200 countries, of whom 85% said Python was their main programming language. To put that in context, Python ranks #4 in the Stack Overflow list of programming languages which “have been used extensively in professional settings in the last year”. In the Stack Overflow survey, Python comes in at 46.9% of extensively used languages, beaten by the trusty combination of HTML and CSS at 52.9%, the SQL database query language at 54.1% and JavaScript most popular at 64.6%.
Python remains popular among those learning to code, although over the years, it’s increased in power (and arguably, complexity) thanks to a huge array of frameworks and extensions that make it effective in many situations. For some, that’s made it not the best choice for newbie coders, but it remains especially well-documented at beginner and intermediate levels. The Python Software Foundation survey showed that a third of respondents had “less than one year” of programming experience, and 40% of developers were aged between 18 and 29. Python use seems to stand the test of time, with 32% of users having 6-11+ years of programming experience. A grounding in at least basic Python appears to last a professional lifetime, with 26% of the survey’s respondents giving their age as over 40.
The number of users of the now-deprecated Python 2 has fallen but remains at 6%, a stubborn statistic possibly explained by a need to maintain legacy code and the continuing presence of ageing teaching materials in schools and colleges. “Almost half of Python 2 holdouts are under 21 years old, and a third are students. Perhaps courses are still using Python 2?” the JetBrains survey results page postulates. Python 3 became the predominant version of Python by around 2022, with version 3.10. 3.11 and 3.12 in most common use according to the latest statistics.
Of those professionally coding full-time (62% described themselves as “fully emploged by a company”), data analysis at 44% was their main focus, with machine learning at 34%, behind Python in web development environments at 44%. Basic, multipurpose scripting and web scraping tasks are still undertaken in Python, with most IT professionals able at least to mentally parse the contents of a simple script.
The most popular IDE (integrated development environment) in use by Pythonistas remained Visual Studio Code from Microsoft at 22%, with Jupyter Notebook a close second at 20%. It’s worth noting, however, that 70% of those surveyed said they used more than one IDE. The survey was a joint project between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains, the latter a commercial producer of development environments for developers. For the traditionalists, Vim was the preferred IDE for 17% of respondents.
Python opportunities in open-source
The Python community seems committed to open-source projects, with 37% saying they’d contributed to open-source projects in the last year, of which the majority (77%) committed code rather than documentation or testing, for example. Around 30% also stated that they’d worked collaboratively on projects in the last year.
The survey’s roundup page states, “The share of developers using Linux as their development environment has decreased through the years: compared with 2021, it’s dropped by 8 percentage points.” There is, however, no differentiation between Windows users (55%) and those running Linux inside a WSL instance.
For some developers, Python is slow (it is interpreted at runtime rather than being compiled into fast machine code), difficult to make portable, and suffers from feature creep away from what was designed to be a relatively simple language. For its advocates, however, it’s quick to learn, can be put to almost any task, runs everywhere and is the closest thing to a computer code lingua franca the developer community has.
While JavaScript continues to be the most common language that’s written and actively maintained, Python gives newbies and advanced users tools that are as simple or complex as required. As a stalwart, and because it’s one of the first programming languages taught to school children and first-year students, its place in the programming language pantheon remains assured.
