Today I was reading the 2018 stack overflow developer survey and boy was it an interesting read. There are loads of insights into the current state of software development.

For example, JavaScript continues to grow in dominance. If you’re working on the web and you’re not learning JavaScript you need to start yesterday. It’s been clear for a few years now that JS is the direction the web development is going, but I don’t think I’d quite realised how much that was the case. 71.5% of all professional developers are now using it in some form. That’s huge!

Another surprise to me is the popularity of various text editors. VS Code has really risen to the top in a short space of time. To my horror Notepad++ (of all things) is the 3rd most popular app. Sublime text somehow trails behind it in 4th place and my beloved Atom is 8th!

With over 100,000 developers participating in the survey, it really is quite a rich resource. Did anything surprise you in the results?