As for developer preferences, JavaScript and Python have maintained their endurance while Rust usage is increasing, according to a recent global developer survey.

A May 4 report titled “State of the Developer Nation, 22nd Edition‘, from analyst firm SlashData, presented data from a survey of more than 20,000 developers in 166 countries, conducted from December 2021 to February 2022.

In this report, JavaScript remained the most popular language for the tenth consecutive survey, with nearly 17.5 million developers using the popular web scripting language. SlashData has been publishing these reports about two to three times a year for several years.

The JavaScript community itself has been growing steadily for several years. Python, which overtook Java in popularity two years ago, was the second most popular language behind JavaScript, with 15.7 million users. In the past six months alone, Python has added 3.3 million net new developers.

Adoption of Rust, meanwhile, has nearly quadrupled in the past 24 months, from 600,000 developers in Q1 2020 to 2.2 million in Q1 2022. [of Rust] empowers people to create with a lot of confidence,” said Rebecca Rumbul, executive director of the Rust Foundation, commenting on the report.

“The community of maintainers and contributors is inclusive and supportive. Rust is also a great choice for developers looking to improve their career prospects, as the demand for Rust developers continues to grow. Rust, according to the report, has been used primarily in IoT projects but also in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) development.

The report includes additional findings that Java continues to experience strong and steady growth. Nearly five million developers have joined the Java community since the start of 2021.

Meanwhile, PHP grew the least over the past six months, with an increase of 600,000 net new developers between Q3 2021 and Q1 2022. But PHP is the second most used language in web applications after JavaScript.

Also, Go and Ruby are big languages ​​in back-end development, but Go has grown more than twice as fast in the last year. The Go community now numbers 3.3 million developers.

Specific to Kotlin, the community grew from 2.4 million developers in Q1 2021 to five million in Q1 2022. This is largely attributed to Google making Kotlin its preferred language for Android development.

Additionally, 46% of developers use low-code or no-code tools for some of their work. Experienced developers, especially those with more than 10 years of experience, are the least likely to use these tools.

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