News

After Swift, Mac Developers Want To Learn Go, Ruby and Python, Survey Says

• By David Ramel
• May 9, 2016

Swift is the "most adored" language atop the learning list among Mac developers, according to a new survey, followed by Go, Ruby and Python.

Among languages in current use, the ubiquitous JavaScript is No. 1, followed by CSS and PHP, reflecting the strong presence of Web developers in the survey. Objective-C, in fourth place, maintains only a 1 percentage point lead over its designated successor, Swift.

Swift is used by 26 percent of more than 7,200 respondents in 108 countries working as software or Web developers on the Mac, according to the Great Mac Developer Survey 2016 published by German company fournova Software GmbH, which makes the Tower desktop client for the Git version control system.

The aforementioned strong Web presence is borne out by the No. 1 reported development role: Web full-stack developer (26 percent), followed by mobile, (23 percent), Web front-end (21 percent) and Web back-end (11 percent).

Among other tools, Sublime Text maintains it dominant position as the favorite text editor, clocking in as the No. 1 choice of 49 percent of developers.

"Sublime Text has been the dominant text editor for years," the survey report said. "And it still is: almost half of devs still use Sublime when not coding in a special IDE. Another third of devs have a much younger competitor in their Dock: Atom.io is a very popular alternative." Vim took third place (21 percent), followed by Coda (12 percent) and TextMate (11 percent).

Git is the overwhelming version control system, used by 95 percent of respondents, with Subversion in second place, listed by 13 percent of developers, who obviously could vote for more than one choice.

For code hosting, GitHub (70 percent) leads Bitbucket (41 percent) and "none or self-managed" (24 percent).

Other results of the survey include:

• Two thirds of devs contribute to open source projects.
• Three out of four devs don't write unit tests or only do so rarely.
• Jenkins is the tool of choice for almost half of Continuous Integration followers (24 percent), though 31 percent don't follow CI.
• Dropbox is the No. 1 file sharing choice (38 percent), followed by Google Drive (29 percent).
• 41 percent of respondents are age 30 to 39; 46 percent have more than 10 years of experience; and 95 percent are male.
• More than half of developers already work from home -- at least partly. And of those that work from their company's office, 57 percent would like to work from home.
• A large majority of developers spend more than half of their days actually programming (14 percent program 6 to 7 hours per day).
• 86 percent have an iPhone; 4 percent have a Windows Phone.
• Nearly 40 percent don't use a dedicated or merge tool; of those who do, Kaleidoscope is the top choice (27 percent).
• Trello is the favorite task management tool (25 percent), leading JIRA (10 percent) and Omnifocus (8 percent).
• The top three bug and issue tracking tools are JIRA (36 percent), GitHub Issues (31 percent) and "none/text files or e-mails" (22 percent).