The " Developer Economics: Developer Status 19th Edition " report released by the developer analyst and research company SlashData pointed out that the popularity of the C# language dropped from third to sixth in three years, but the number of users is absolutely In terms of value, the use of C# is still growing, and it is particularly popular in game development. The report is based on more than 17,000 developers worldwide and analyzes the absolute number of programming language users.
The report pointed out that JavaScript is still firmly at the top of the most popular list, with 12.4 million developers using the language. The second is Python, which has 9 million users, and Java, which has 8.2 million users. The programming languages of four, five and six are not much different. They are C/C++ with 6.3 million users, PHP with 6.1 million, and C# with 6 million. Among them, JavaScript data includes TypeScript.
Slashdata compared these data with mid-2017 data and found that the number of developers using JavaScript increased by 5 million during this period, and Java increased by 1.6 million. In addition, driven by the increasing use of data science and machine learning, the number of developers using Python increased by 2.2 million in the last year alone.
On the contrary, C#'s situation is not optimistic. In the context of the rapid growth of C/C++ and PHP, the language has dropped three places in the past three years. According to the report, C# may maintain its dominant position in the game and AR/VR developer ecosystem; but it may be because of the emergence of cross-platform tools based on Web technology that the language seems to be losing its advantage in desktop development. In addition, C# is not popular in data science, machine learning, and mobile. In the network and cloud fields, JavaScript, Java, and PHP are the most popular among developers, while C# is the average.
The application of C# in games will mainly benefit from its presence in popular game engines. Microsoft recently posted on this topic , mentioning Unity and CryEngine that use C# to write scripts, and .NET game engines such as MonoGame and Stride.
The Register believes that although Microsoft will be happy to see the popularity of .NET in game development, it is likely to see the use of the Internet and the cloud as a more strategic approach based on market interests. On the other hand, although the survey results show that C# is losing to latecomers in the most strategic market, its efforts to establish .NET in the mobile field through Xamarin technology have not won it enough developers. But it can be said that if Microsoft does not open source .NET, then the downward trend of C# may be even greater.
Slashdata also studied the use of cloud technology and investigated the developer’s technology preferences and the reasons for adopting or rejecting cloud technology. The results show that back-end developers like containers, with an adoption rate of 60%, followed by database as a service (45%) and cloud platform as a service (32%). Container orchestration is also very popular (27%), with Kubernetes accounting for more than 50%. Serverless, or services such as AWS Lambda or Azure Cloud Functions, accounted for 26%.
Among them, price, support and documentation, and ease of development/speed are the most important factors leading to these choices; performance is called the least important factor.
It is worth noting that among the reasons given by developers for not adopting cloud technology . As of now, the top factor is price . Especially when it comes to virtual machine infrastructure as a service, 48% of developers mentioned price. The same is true for other categories, such as database as a service (38%) and Serverless (34%).
In addition, the report also examines the trends in DevOps. Combining continuous integration and continuous delivery data shows that there is a 77% adoption rate. However, the report pointed out that developers are still skeptical of fully automated CI/CD pipelines, with 40% choosing manual deployment.