Java and JavaScript the most used programming languages, but Azure is giving way to Google, says survey

Java and JavaScript remain the most popular programming languages used by coders, according to a new survey by JetBrains.

In its latest State of Developer Ecosystem report, the software development firm surveyed 7,000 coders about key industry trends.

The main takeaways are that Java is the most popular primary programming language; JavaScript is the most used overall; Go is the most promising; and Python is the most studied.

Sixty-nine per cent of developers have used JavaScript over the past 12 months, followed by HTML/CSS (61 per cent), SQL (56 per cent), Java (50 per cent), Python (49 per cent) and Shell scripting languages (40 per cent).

'The programming languages with the most love are Java and Python. Second place is a tie between C# and JavaScript. But if the results are normalised by sample size, C# is the most loved language,' explained JetBrains.

When it comes to the most popular primary programming languages, JavaScript (40 per cent), Java (34 per cent), Python (27 per cent), HTML/CSS (23 per cent) and SQL (19 per cent) came top. Others include PHP, C#, TypeScript, C++ and Shell.

JetBrains continued: 'There appears to be a group of ‘secondary' languages - ones used mainly as an additional language - which include HTML, SQL and Shell scripting.

'A lot of software developers have some practice with these secondary languages, but very few work with them as their major language. For example, while 56 per cent practice SQL, only 19 per cent called it their primary language and only 1.5 per cent rank it as their first language.'

The report also found that Windows is the most-used operating system for development, with 57 per cent of developers using the platform. This is followed by macOS (49 per cent) and Unix/Linux (48 per cent).

However, developers use Google Cloud Platform more than Microsoft Azure. AWS had a strong lead, with 67 per cent of coders developing on it, compared to 28 per cent on GCP and just 21 per cent on Microsoft's cloud.

The popularity of GCP over Azure may be tied to Google's container orchestration solution Kubernetes; 41 per cent of Kubernetes devs use the Google cloud.

And the most developed types of applications are web back-end (60 per cent), web front-end (46 per cent), mobile (23 per cent), libraries and frameworks (14 per cent) and desktop (12 per cent).

As for tooling, 80 per cent of developers use source code collaboration tools; 75 per cent use a standalone IDE; 71 per cent use a lightweight desktop editor; 45 per cent use a continuous integration or continuous delivery tool; and 44 per cent use an issue tracker.

'89 per cent of developers customize their IDEs in some way,' claims JetBrains.

'Even more developers have joined the Dark side: 83 per cent prefer the Dark theme for their editor or IDE. This represents a growth of 6 percentage points since last year for each environment.'

We have picked out the salient points, but there is much more information in the survey itself.