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Comment by PommeDeTerre | Hacker News Reader

I think that you may be vastly overestimating the number of web and mobile app developers. They're still a relatively small proportion of all software developers.

While web developers may be more vocal and have more content on the web (this isn't unexpected, since they are web developers, after all), you shouldn't forget about the numerous other developers out there. They're working on systems software, embedded software, industrial control software, accounting and billing software, various other kinds of business software, scientific software, and so forth.

These days, these kinds of developers generally use Windows or Linux systems, running on non-Mac PC hardware of some sort. And there are a whole lot of these developers.

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It's a shame too because it's a complete mess in these other fields. And the open source community has been trying to fill in the gaps(quite well I might add). But again official documentation is still lagging. Which is understandable, these people have lives and they are doing it in their free time.

If you look at ARM and Microcontroller development, it's really a sad state of affairs. There isn't a single option officially ARM gives you to do Linux based application. Ironically the only software that is probably going to run on those embedded devices...Linux.

Honestly I wish they would scrap their horrible pathetic excuse for a development environment, and listen to the community who actually you know buy their devices.

Case in point. Try to compare the horridness of the Official STM32 libraries with libopencm3, which is amazing and incredibly simple.

Sincerely.. Fed up embedded developer.

> I think that you may be vastly overestimating the number of web and mobile app developers. They're still a relatively small proportion of all software developers.

Do you think? I'd be interested to see statistics on this (I'm not doubting you in saying that!). Being as web development (in my experience as a web developer and occasional software developer) is the entry level for software development, I'd have thought web developers easily make up the majority of overall software developers. Everyone is a PHP developer these days, it seems.

Perhaps you're right though (having just read your second paragraph).

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