Developer Survey Results 2019 (opens in new tab)

In my experience, virtually all people who learned programming as children were self-taught. This was definitely the case 10-20 years ago and I don't think it has declined that much.

Maybe this is an American perspective, but I was surprised that anyone would assume children are primarily learning programming in classes. Even today, I know several elementary school children who have programming as a hobby -- they are learning on their own using the Internet for the most part.

I'm a weirdo.

I did not take any programming classes in high school. BUT...

My first code was at around age 7 (in the mid-1980s). I found a computer (Commodore 64, including manual) in a very rural area off the side of a road where some people dumped trash. And at school, I got invited into a special program starting around second grade, that included doing some projects in BASIC. But then I didn't really do any coding in high school. But then I majored in Computer Science. But then I dropped out...

All that is to say, at least in my low-cost-of-living area, we had this weird dichotomy where a few special snowflakes got to learn programming in primary school, but then our high school didn't offer any programming classes at all!

I was tinkering around with BASIC on any computer I could get my hands on. (Found it installed on my mum's old 80286 and on the old Dells lining my rural school's labs). That would have been in the early/mid 90's-2000's

By the time I was 15 or 16 the school had just started offering a very basic programming course that had you write programs to do simple things in Turing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language))

It was wired up to a canvas like space so we could write simple animations, etc.

That would have been in the early 2000's.

I learned how to program on my grandparents' C64 as a wee lad nearly 30 years ago and haven't gotten away from keyboards since. I learned more on my own than I ever did in school.

I had a C++ class in high school where I felt like I really learned nothing. I never wrote anything more complex than input and print statements. I spent the entire class reading other stuff and playing videogames. It was unsupervised and learn-at-your-own-pace, so everyone could do whatever they wanted so long as you turned in a final assignment. Mine was just inputs and print statements.

I technically wrote my first line of code in that class, but I didn't actually start programming until nearly a decade later IMO.

I graduated high school in 1995, so 24 years ago. I was taking programming classes in high school.

My first programming classes were actually offered in elementary school during 4th grade, but that was only offered to "advanced" students and not part of general education. Still, that would have been about 32 years ago.

My first real programming class was in 9th grade, 1997. That class was around for a while. The language was BASIC, but covered all CS topics (if then, loops, disk i/o...and even GOTO hah!). My middle school had computers with rudimentary programming but I wouldn't consider it a real programming class.

I took programming classes in elementary school 20 years ago. It wasn’t officially a programming class but we didn’t really need 8 years of school to learn how to type and use spreadsheets so eventually anyone who was ahead of the curve was taught programming even if it was something as simple as Visual Basic.

I started programming at 15 after getting into custom WarCraft III maps, went from a GUI Interface to JASS (WC3's scripting language) and finally started using C to make my own small mini-games, I imagine it's not an uncommon path among young people that want to be game developers.

At the very least, you don’t (and didn’t) need to take classes to learn to program. Cprogramming.com and the Java trails were what I started with. (And lots of books from Barnes & Noble.)

> surprised how few people use Microsoft SQL Server.

Ok.

> I guess most people don't work with databases at all?

How does that follow?

Dumb comment. "Not using Microsoft SQL Server" != "don't work with databases" Sensible people prefer Postgres.

"Like last year, MySQL is the most commonly used database. PostgreSQL has taken the second spot this year."

SO has a somewhat "niche" audience- most of the MS stack has a single source of truth about documentation (and it's detailed). People using MS stack are also the people using MS SQL Server.

Btw, do you know if the MS SQL server perf analysis tools are available for linux?

Microsoft SQL server ain’t free to use in production.

People selling stuff (to clients, to investors) think having a big open room full of developers using computers is impressive enough to help them sell. The developer zoo.

A normal professional office with hallways and doors doesn't look that impressive, or might but only if dedicated lobby and (client) meeting areas have had some real money & space dedicated to them.

I fully expect to be sitting on a rug in 10 years.

They’ll probably have people’s kids running around the office.

I'm not so sure about this conclusion. I feel that below-average developers are less likely to answer stack overflow surveys at all. In my anecdotal experience, below-average devs usually have little interest in interacting with the overall "developer community" or reading about development more than the absolute minimum needed to finish their assigned tasks.

It's the same with car drivers, right? Illusory superiority

It makes sense that more developed countries would have lower optimism. If the previous generation already had a decent quality-of-life, there's less reason to assume that the next generation will have it even better. Developing countries are more likely to have significant recent salient difficulties that the next generation will no longer have.

I’m not surprised, you can see it in our politics in the UK all the time.

I think I'm about to go into the offer phase with a company. I've already been told by the recruiter that the salary is 80k. Looking at the Python results, I'm honestly thinking about sending them this dev survey. Like, "just so we're clear, you are intentionally underpaying?"

Maybe because the backend is getting dumber and dumber (micro/nano services) while the frontend is getting more complex (SPAs, almost like desktops apps).

And I say this as a backend developer who makes these dumb backends that are little more than a glorified layer over postgres.

If that's a reference to typescript, it can also be used as a backend language with node. That may contribute to the growth, too.

Phase 2 is nearly complete.

Presumably, the people who fill out the survey are a very specific cross-section of the industry. Those who use a BSD are much less likely to answer a SO survey than a survey from a site with more BSD users, which makes it virtually impossible to get reasonable data.

Interestingly Rails is also high in the “wanted” and “loved” section. To each their own preference, right?(;

Laughably so...I once spoke to a software engineer that wrote systems for fighter jets and I didn't recognize any terms or acronyms of any tech he used on a daily basis.

SO was heavily C# & .NET biased in its earlier years. I'm not sure that is still the case in platform usage. Also not sure if that's the case on this survey as C# was just barely above PHP & was less than half of JS in terms of respondents. JavaScript, Python & Java were all higher.