The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey is out now. Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of developers around the world. The survey covered everything from developers’ favorite technologies to job preferences. 2020 marks the 10th year that Stack Overflow has released its annual developer survey, which polled nearly 65,000 developers from around the world.

“This year, we didn’t set out to be the biggest survey ever, but set out to make our survey more representative of the diversity of programmers around the world,” Stack Overflow said. The survey was conducted in February, when the COVID-19 pandemic was having an impact on some work, so there may have been an impact on the data.

Some of the highlights of the survey are:

  • After growing steadily over the past five years, Python has fallen from second place last year to third place this year on the list of most popular technologies, beaten by TypeScript. Rust topped the list for the fifth consecutive year.

  • Site reliability engineers and DevOps specialists are still the highest paid. Eighty percent of respondents consider DevOps to be at least somewhat important, while 44 percent work in organizations with at least one DevOPs-dedicated employee.

  • Fifty-two percent of respondents searching online for coding solutions found “Hello, old friend” and found that the first result link was purple, indicating they had already visited it.

  • More than 75% of developers work overtime occasionally — one or two days per quarter. 25% of employees work 1-2 days or more overtime per week.

  • Australian respondents reported the highest average coding experience at 16.9 years, followed by developers in the United Kingdom and the United States. Related to this, the AVERAGE age of respondents was highest in the US and THE UK, at 33.7 and 33.1 years respectively.

  • There is evidence that people of color are underrepresented in professional developers.

  • When asked what steps to take to solve a coding problem, 90% of respondents said they visited Stack Overflow.

Technical trends related data

The most popular technology

Programming, scripting, and Markdown languages

For the eighth year in a row, JavaScript has topped the list of the most popular programming languages. In addition, TypeScrip is ahead of C in popularity. Ruby, which briefly cracked the top 10 in 2017, has fallen back, overtaken by the likes of Go and Kotlin.

Web framework

As you can see, jQuery is still the most widely used in the 2020 survey, but it is slowly losing ground to React.js and Angular. More than 35% of respondents said they were using jQuery, React, Angular (Angular/Angular 2) or ASP.NET/ASP,.NET Core.

Other frameworks, libraries, and tools

Node.js topped the list for the second year in a row, with half of respondents using it. Data analytics and machine learning technologies (such as Pandas, TensorFlow, and Torch/PyTorch) became widespread and grew across the board.

The database

Most of the results are consistent with those observed last year. MySQL consistently tops the list, followed by PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. However, Firebase’s popularity has grown slightly and this year it has the edge over Elasticsearch.

Favorite technology

Developers’ favorite and most desirable programming languages to learn

For the fifth year in a row, Rust has topped the list as the most loved programming language. TypeScript overtook Python in second place compared to last year. Go has made big strides, climbing to no. 5 from no. 10 last year.

Python topped the list for the fourth year in a row as the programming language developers most want to learn, while Rust also grew.

Web frameworks that developers love and want to learn about the most

ASP.NET Core beat Out React.js as the most popular Web framework. Gatsby, the new entry, has ranked fifth, favored by 60% of respondents. React.js remains the most popular Web framework for developers to learn about.

Developer’s favorite database

Redis is still the most popular, followed by PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch. IBM DB2 is considered the scariest database, and MongoDB is still the database technology developers want to learn.

Development environment and tools

The developer’s workhorse operating system

Almost half of respondents use Windows as their primary operating system. The rest is split almost equally between MacOS and Linux versions.

Finally, in terms of the highest-paying programming languages, respondents who use Perl, Scala, and Go have the highest salaries globally, with a median salary of around $75K.