The State of Developer Ecosystem 2021

Jetbrains’ fifth annual developer ecosystem survey gathers results from polling 31,743 developers across 183 countries or regions. The report shows trends in programming languages, frameworks, operating systems, and salaries among developers in 2021. The article highlights the most important trends found in the report.

Again, JavaScript is the most popular programming language, with 69% of the survey respondents saying that they have used it in the last 12 months. HTML/CSS (60%) is the second most popular language followed by  SQL (54%), Python (52%), and Java (49%).

39% of the respondents also say JavaSCript is their primary programming language, followed by Java (32%), Python (24%), and HTML/CSS (24%).

The top-5 languages developers are planning to adopt or migrate to are Go, Kotlin, TypeScript, Python, and Rust.

Go, Kotlin, TypeScript, Python, and Rust are the top 5 languages developers are planning to migrate to/ adopt in 2021.

71% of the respondents are web backend developers, followed by frontend developers (58%) and desktop (32%) and mobile developers(30%), making web programming the most common type of programming among developers.

With 61% of the respondents confirming that Windows is their preferred development operating system, the category has remained constant over the past five editions of the survey. Linux (61%) is the second most preferred development OS, followed by macOS (44%).

86% of desktop developers say they target Windows OS with their software, 58% Linux and macOS with 39%.

Delphi (83%) is the most widely used language for Desktop programming, Dart (92%), Objective-C (94%), and Swift (90%) are the most commonly used for Mobile programming. For web backend, Elixir and PHP are the first most widely used programming languages (95%), followed by Ruby (88%), Clojure (86%), and SQL (86%).

Except for Japan (Python), India (Python), France (PHP), South Korea (Java), and China (Java), JavaScript is the most popular programming language across all regions.

Even though the majority of the male, female, and other (non-binary, genderqueer, gender non-conforming) genders are involved in coding activities, there is a higher percentage of females in UI/UX design/research, data analysis, and machine learning than male. Also, male developers are more likely to be involved in infrastructure development and DevOps activities than females.

By a wide margin (at least 80%), male developers are more dominant in many regions than other genders. Male developers are also more experienced (97%) than females (2%) and other genders (2%).

Developer immigration is highest in Canada (29%), United Kingdom (23%) and Northern Europe and Benelux (22%), while emigration is highest in Ukraine (29%), Belarus (20%), and East Europe, Balkan, and Caucasus (18%).

United States is by far the highest paying for tech roles (an average of 102,000), followed by Canada (54,000), the UK (54,000), and Germany (33,000).

Software architect and CIO/CTO are the top-paying tech job roles. DevOps engineer salary follows (33,000) then Developer/Software engineer (27,000).

Figures from this survey show substantial similarity with the 2021 StackOverflow developer survey and the CodinGame developer survey suggesting that data from each of these reports are valid and can be relied on.