JavaScript Most Popular Language: Stack Overflow Report

According to the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language and Rust is most loved.

Stack Overflow, the popular question-and-answer community site for developers, today released the results of its annual developer survey, which indicates, among other things, that JavaScript is the most popular programming language among respondents.

More than 50,000 developers—56,033 to be exact—in 173 countries around the world responded to the survey. Stack Overflow is so popular among developers that every eight seconds, a developer asks a question on the site. In January alone, 46 million people visited Stack Overflow to get help or give help to a fellow developer.

"This is a highly impressive survey and one of its kind," said Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC. "Stack Overflow has an incredible user base and it is great to see them survey them with such a fairly extensive survey. While I think we can learn a lot from such surveys, we have to realize that there are always limits to what can be intuited. They asked 45 questions, which is at the high-end of the scale of survey length that people—especially developers—are willing to answer."

While the 2016 Stack Overflow survey only reached .4 percent of the estimated 15 million developers worldwide, a large majority of respondents (85.3 percent of full-stack developers) cited JavaScript as the programming language they most commonly use. Meanwhile, 32.2 percent of respondents cited Angular as the most important technology to them and 27.1 cited Node.js—giving JavaScript and JavaScript based technologies three of the top 10 slots among the most popular technologies used by developers. Angular was number five and Node.js came in at number eight.

Source : eweek.com