14 DAY TRIAL // This year, 56,033 coders from 173 countries took the time to answer StackOverflow's annual developer survey, and the results have now been published.
The survey's main finding is that almost all developers these days are fluent in JavaScript. Over 85% of all full-stack developers prefer it, over 90% of frontend developers use it, and almost 55% of backend developers have helped JavaScript become the leading technology in all of these categories.
Other technologies in which most of today's developers are fluent are SQL, C#, PHP, AngularJS, Java, SQL Server, Node.js, Python, and LAMP.
JavaScript has been the king on StackOverflow's ranking for quite some time now, ever since 2014, when it wrestled the lead away from SQL.
Developers hate VisualBasic and WordPress
StackOverflow also asked developers what the technologies they loved, dreaded, and wanted to learn were.
The top 5 most loved technologies were Rust, Swift, F#, Scala, and Go. The most dreaded technologies were VisualBasic, WordPress, Matlab, Sharepoint, and CoffeeScript. The top 5 technologies everybody wanted to learn were Android, Node.js, AngularJS, Python, and JavaScript.
So even if not fluent in JavaScript, most developers recognized the need to learn it, and JavaScript's dominance will be even more accentuated in the coming years.
Database skills help developers get better salaries
As for salaries, you'd be happy to know that the top 3 paying technologies in the US are Apache Spark, Scala, and Cassandra, while for the rest of world, it's F#, Dart, and Cassandra.
For full-stack developers, the top-paying technologies are something that StackOverflow considered "Cloud" tech, React, and Redis. For frontend development, it was React, Node.js, and Angular, while for mobile development, the better-paid jobs were for Objective-C, iOS, and Android technologies.
Another topic in the survey was the developers' favorite development tools. The survey revealed that Notepad++ was as popular as Visual Studio and that most developers these days use Macs over Windows 7 and Linux stations for their work PC, all while Windows 10 is closely nearing the top 3.
