State of the Developer Nation: Coding language popularity, China’s developer market, how developers

The 22nd Developer Nation global survey from SlashData reached more than 20,000 developers in 166 countries. Its findings are bundled in a free “State of the Developer Nation” report. 

This research report delves into key developer trends for Q1 2022, taking a particular interest in the following:

1. Language communities – An update

2. Understanding developer personalities

3. Who is using low-code/no-code tools?

4. Spotlight on China and the rest of East Asia

5. How developers generate revenues

6. Emerging technologies

Here are some highlights from the report, guaranteed to intrigue your curiosity:

Language communities – An update

1. JavaScript remains the most popular programming language for the tenth survey in a row, with close to 17.5M developers worldwide using it. Python has remained the second most widely adopted language behind JavaScript. Python now counts 15.7M users.

2. Go and Ruby are important languages in backend development but Go has grown more than twice as fast in the past year in absolute terms.

Rust has nearly tripled in size in the past 24 months, from just 0.6M developers in Q1 2020 to 2.2M in Q1 2022. State of the Developer Nation 22nd Edition

Spotlight on China and the rest of East Asia

1. More than a quarter of developers in Greater China (26%) and the rest of East Asia (27%) don’t use Stack Overflow, which is more than three times the rate of developers in the rest of the world (8%).

2. The Greater China area has a relatively low concentration of highly- experienced developers (16+ years of development) when compared to developers in the rest of East Asia and the rest of the world.

3. More than half of Chinese developers have learned how to code via undergraduate degrees in computing, which is about 10 percentage points more than developers in the rest of East Asia and the rest of the world.

How developers generate revenues

1. Contracted development is the revenue model of choice across all industry verticals, used by nearly a third (31%) of professional developers.

2. Less than one in ten (7%) professional developers are generating revenue from selling data.

3. Usage of the advertising revenue model declines as companies grow in size.

4. Developers working for large enterprises (5K+ employees) tend to use multiple revenue models less often than developers in smaller companies.

Below we have included a few graphs that illustrate some of the findings.

You can download the full report for free and access all data and insights within.

If you need additional information or looking to understand developer preferences’, please get in touch with us and we will dive into it together.