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What Tools Developers Actually Use

readwriteweb.com

42 pointsGarbage38 comments

I think there is some serious selection bias. In particular, I think they mostly talked to web developers. (Of course, it's also possible that web developers now make up the majority of developers, but I'd like to see a separate study on that.) They show the "industry" breakdown, but 83% are under "technology" which is too generic to tell me anything meaningful.

Ah, they do say the people surveyed are at companies with less than 100 employees, so, yeah, there's some selection bias.

Curious if git is commonly used in companies over 100 people.

Facebook uses git. Many open source projects with more than 100 contributors do too, of course.

We use git at Rackspace.

Not just web developers. Web developers on Mac OSX. Textmate's massive lead over everything else is proof positive of that.

Note also the total lack of Visual Studio. It's not even 5%? C'mon. Even just among web developers, ASP.NET is bigger than that.

Am I the only one who finds something odd about these numbers - 9% are using .NET yet less than 4% are using Visual Studio.NET? My personal observation is something close to 90-100% of .NET developers use VS.NET.

Not really. I also am baffled by django and rails being top, but then eclipse as ide? And Objective-C being below 5% but Xcode 10%.

This just either smells like a load of crap of the survey was done in a very inconsistent manner. (Not giving an option for 'I don't use an IDE' or the likes.

Assuming someone was told to do a survey, and didn't care to make sense of the results or doesn't have the background to interpret them... happens in school all the time...

That would be a bit concerning, given that (according to the story), the survey was run by a company whose business is recommending "work apps".

News is sort of a broken industry :) Big misalignment of incentives - everything is about readership and generating traffic. I know plenty of people that write, and very few of them are knowledgable on the subject matter they write about (and they know it). It's just an industry like any other, with a product and a customer.

Besides, my business is 'whatever I want it to be.' The scary thing here is, now that it's been reported, it can now be cited as 'fact'

They probably just asked their users, which is a huge selection bias.

I kindof curious how many people use IDEs.

I just write everything in VIM.

If I was answering a survey on IDEs, I'd say I use Vim. It's what I use to do something that people use an IDE for, ergo, it's my IDE.

If someone asks me what I use as my IDE, I say none. IDE stands for integrated development environment. I don't have an integrated development environment. I have a modular development environment. It's called Unix.

Good point. My IDE is bash. Through it I use components and plug ins ("programmes") to edit code, run tests, commit to svn, pull down changes, etc. Bash is my development environment.

I think most people use IDEs, just as more people (including programmers) use Windows.

The survey says "the asked 500 leading software developers from around the world".

So, this is more about rock-star programmers and such, not people using .NET/VS in the enterprise. Especially as it talks about companies with <= 100 employees.

Probably people more like the Miguel De Icaza, Jeff Atwood etc types that probably use Vim/Emacs or such to work with .NET.

Even so, so many people using Notepad++? WTF?

I'd be surprised to see a large number of 'rock star' devs using Eclipse.

Well, at least a large number of rock star devs created it, the OTI team was quite influential in its prime, Dave Thomas et al (not of Prag. Programmers fame).

"Even so, so many people using Notepad++? WTF?"

I've seen more than a handful of really smart developers use notepad, even without the ++. It's always surprising, but there's probably a lesson to learn.

I've seen...really smart developers use notepad...there's probably a lesson to learn.

I find that really hard to believe, and I can't imagine what the lesson would be. It's akin to a NASCAR driver driving a Camry. It's true that the tools don't make the dev, but if what you say is true those devs are just hampering themselves.

What's wrong with Notepad++? Notepad++ is the Windows equivalent of Coda or TextMate, it's one of the first things I install every time I'm on a Windows machine.

I can get my Notepad++ themes off my source-control and have the exact same look/feel on whatever machine I am, and it has FTP/SFTP, Subversion, and more recently, Git plugins available too.

Oh I probably should say that I don't disagree that the survey is very biased (just look at the sample size), but Notepad++ is one of the only few things on that list I'm not shocked to see.

I've used Notepad++ on my Windows days. It's nothing like Coda (which is itself limited), or TextMate. Hence my reaction.

It's more like a dumbed down version of TextWrangler.

At the risk of asking an often-repeated question:

I use Notepad++ - at the moment this is predominantly Python + HTML/CSS/JS

If not Notepad++, what else should I be looking at?

The whole thing is odd. For example, look at the IDE category as a whole. Aptana is a set of plugins for Eclipse, and Selenium IDE is an Firefox plugin "IDE" for a very specific tool/purpose (writing Selenium tests) rather than a generic coding IDE like the rest. Visual Studio should definitely be in there too, given the numbers for .NET and MSSQL.

I'm also wondering why GitHub isn't somewhere on here. It seems like it'd fit in several categories ("project management" and "bug tracking" to start), and I have a hard time believing that a demographic composed of 53% Git users and 28% Rails devs would have less than 4% using GitHub for either of those purposes.

My general observation is: if they presented the data as an infographic, the methods are broken.

How did they choose the "500 leading developers"? This seems to be heavily skewed towards web development.

I found this infographic worthless. Leading developers? How did they decide that? Minority Java and .NET? What kind of developers are they talking about?

Where is emacs? I'm not expecting it to get #1 or anything, but a very healthy number of devs use it.

Version Control: 53% use git, 31% svn, 3% beanstalk?

which of these is not like the other.

Leaving aside questions about sample size / methodology / etc, here are the big surprises for me:

FRAMEWORKS - CodeIgniter at 6%. I use it for some projects, but I'm surprised that 6% of 'top developers' are still using it too given that it's an older entry in the (very crowded) field of PHP frameworks, AND it's PHP (which everyone loves to hate).

TEXT EDITORS - Nice to see Coda on the list. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but it's a great product with just the right mix of minimal features for me (syntax highlighting, simple FTP, sane keyboard shortcuts).

No dreamweaver for webdevelopping? Gosh I tried everything and I just can't find something better in my opinion.

Surprising that SQL Server beats out Postgres, especially considering these are developers in companies <100 people.

This is not reliable at all. Look at the numbers for Oracle for database.

All the companies they surveyed are less than 100 people. I'm actually surprised it's that high.

I don't think RoR is really a "tool"

It's a framework, which is what it's filed under.

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