2017 Software Development Salary Survey

Tools and Programming Languages

NEW TOOLS ARE ALWAYS APPEARING and others maturing and disappearing. Knowing what operating systems, programming languages, text editors, IDEs, data tools, build tools, cloud containers, and frameworks that people are using allows us to see trends in the industry.

These charts include both student and non-student responses. It is interesting to see which tools the next generation of programmers are familiar with and which will potentially need to be learned on the job.

Our results show that programming languages, operating systems, and platforms sometimes trend together. For instance, Objective-C is being replaced by Swift in the future programming languages category. We saw Objective-C drop 2% in popularity compared to last year’s survey and Swift make its first appearance on the list, coming in fourth at 15%. In the OS category, macOS usage dropped almost 8% compared to last year’s survey. Similarly, iOS development dropped a percentage point (from 11% to 10%), but Xcode use increased 6%.

There are now more Android developers than last year (12% versus 11%). Android Studio made its first appearance as an IDE this year, with 7% of our respondents using it. Java holds strong as a popular programming language (36%) and as a past and future programming language (24% and 7%, respectively).

While Android is written mainly in Java, Google’s other programming language, Go, is also a hot topic. Only about 4.5% of the respondents say they use Go, while ...