News

C# Slides in Usage Ranking of Programming Languages

• By David Ramel
• 10/23/2020

Microsoft's C# programming language continues to slide in the latest SlashData usage report out for Q3 2020.

That report is the "Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation, 19th Edition," just published by research firm SlashData, which now pegs C# at No. 6 in usage, behind JavaScript, Python, Java, C/C++ and PHP.

One year ago, C# was at No. 4, and in Q2 2017 it was at No. 3.

While the language is experiencing growth in usage, "The fact that C# lost three places in the ranking of language communities during the last three years is mostly explained by its slower growth compared to C/C++ and PHP," SlashData said.

The company measures usage mainly via questions on its continuing series of surveys conducted every six months.

Earlier this year, C# didn't fare so well in the 18th edition of the survey, when SlashData said the language it "seems to be losing its edge in desktop development -- possibly due to the emergence of cross-platform tools based on web technologies." The company says the same thing in the new report.

In a ranking of the size of programming language communities, C# is said to be used by some 6 million developers, up from 5.8 million in the previous edition of the report.

Other highlights of the report related to the size of programming language communities include:

• JavaScript is the most popular programming language by a wide margin, with 12.4M developers globally using it.
• Python now counts 9M users, after adding 2.2M net new developers in the past year alone, outranking Java at the beginning 2020.
• Kotlin is one of the fastest growing language communities, having increased more than twofold in size since the end 2017.

"Swift surpassed Kotlin in popularity this year, after attracting slightly more net new developers in the first half of 2020 (400k vs 300k). Since Swift became the default language for development across all Apple platforms, the adoption of Objective C has been decreasing steadily. This phase-out from the Apple app ecosystem is also matched by a significant drop in the rank of Objective C, from ninth to 12th place," the report said.

Other highlights of the report not related to programming languages include:

• Four in ten developers report that they need more flexibility in working hours/workload as a consequence of COVID-19.
• Collaboration tools and platforms are the most important technical need for developers.
• The vast majority of professional developers (more than 80%) are involved in DevOps in one way or another.
• Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) are two of the most common DevOps practices, but only one in four developers use both to fully automate their workflow.
• Developers appreciate collaborating and interacting with the open-source community more than contributing to open-source projects.
• Pricing and support/documentation dominate developers’ decision-making process when adopting a cloud technology, but pricing is by far the most important reason for rejection.
• Emerging technologies such as AR and VR are not fully engaging OSS principles.
• Little change in engagement and adoption rates indicate that DevOps has reached maturity.
• Fog/edge computing is gaining traction amongst developers engaged with the topic, but overall engagement is low.

The 19th Developer Economics global survey wave ran from June to August 2020 and reached more than 17,000 developers in 159 countries. The report is available for free at the link above upon providing registration information.