More Developers Working Across Mobile, IoT And Cloud, Argues VisionMobile

A new study from analyst house VisionMobile has looked into the global developer landscape and found Java to be the most popular language while devs are increasingly working across multiple sectors, including mobile, IoT, and cloud.

The latter makes sense as tools and languages work across sectors, the developers using them do as well yet the research, which polls more than 30,000 developers each year, found some other interesting findings.

The figures, which are presented in an infographic which assesses the landscape ‘if there were 100 developers in the world’, confirmed that software development is distinctly unequal; only 6% of respondents were women. Yet the number of ‘hobbyist’ developers continues to rise; 77% of those polled said they were professionals, compared to 23% who develop as a side project.

Java was cited by 21% of respondents as their primary language, ahead of C# (16%), HTML (12%), JavaScript (11%), and C/C++ (11%). 36% of developers say they work in two sectors – in other words, they’re not just confined to the web, or mobile – while almost a quarter (23%) say they work in three. 7% of developers work across desktop, mobile, IoT, and cloud.

The figures from VisionMobile correlate closely with research from TIOBE, which has consistently been plotting the most popular development languages on a monthly basis. Java is again at top spot from TIOBE’s analysis, again with 21% share, followed by C (13.2%), C++ (6.7%), C# (4.5%), and Python (3.8%).

Related figures from VisionMobile examined the proliferation of IoT development, and found that 91% of IoT developers use open source technology in their projects. The three primary reasons cited by IoT developers for their use of open source were its culture and ideals in other words, the idea of free speech getting the best technology and support, and being on the cutting edge of technology. [Developer Tech]