The State of Developer Ecosystem 2021 | Hacker News Reader

The State of Developer Ecosystem 2021

jetbrains.com

25 pointsdayanruben13 comments

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A few interesting points:

- Rust is now more popular than Scala as a primary language

- No mention of Clojure in "primary programming languages", no F# either.

- MacOS is the least used development environment between the big 3.

- France uses PHP the most. That's something I always believed, but it's nice to have data on it.

- 47% of respondants cook for themselves. I'd like to see a breakdown by country of this one.

> - MacOS is the least used development environment between the big 3.

What's important here is if it's used by the developers that matters. Mind share can mean more than market share.

What do you mean by "the developers that matters"? What makes you believe than the mind share is different than the market share?

Developers that are setting trends.

Best example is Node.js. First versions were only for OSX and Linux. Same thing with DOOM being developed on NeXT hardware.

That's a good point but with Docker and WSL I think these days it doesn't matter much.

Interesting, most respondents were backend devs, and still JavaScript was most popular.

I've been writing my backends in TypeScript for years now. This after having written C#, Java, Python and PHP backends. Dabbled a bit in Go but settled on Node.js / TypeScript. It may not be perfect, but sharing interfaces and code with the frontend and having a single language has been a huge productivity boost.

I'm currently loving FastAPI and Sqlalchemy, but I have been looking for TypeScript equivalents - TS is such a nice language to work with.

What libraries are you using? I haven't found anything that seems to match the easy OpenAPI schema generation and validation that FastAPI and Pydantic provide.

For API backends mostly Express + postgraphile (basic CRUD operations) + socket.io (realtime features). Currently exploring Prisma 2 as replacement for Knex.js (query builder). Knex.js does everything I need except having automatic TypeScript integration. Prisma 2 has fantastic TypeScript integration but lacks many features.

I write my own validation logic and use the same code on the frontend (React+MobX) and backend. Automatic API docs are less important for me as I don't have third party API access and use TypeScript interfaces as API contracts. I run my own business and stuff like validation is something I write only once, and perhaps update and extend every now and then. If you develop many projects for external clients, this setup might be to involved and I can see why something like FastAPI is a timesaver.

I used Pulumi IaC with TypeScript, and saw the same benefit.

Sharing interfaces between IaC and backend is pretty nice.

Given this, I'm surprised that APIs wasn't a category for what's being developed and likely got lumped into Websites.

Maybe that's due to lots of fullstack devs who will use javascript no matter what?

Can't blame them.

I used it for frontend, APIs, mobile, IoT, IaC, and games.

Quite versatile language

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