Results of StackOverflow developer survey

Results of StackOverflow developer survey

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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Hi emacs-devel,

StackOverflow (a programming Q&A website) recently run a user survey, including a question about IDEs; they got about 50'000 responses.

The results are at https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-development-environments . About 5% of programmers who care to share use Emacs as one of their IDEs; the most popular are Visual Studio and Notepad++ (35% each), followed by SublimeText, Vim, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and others (Emacs is #15 on that list).

Interestingly, the 2015 survey at https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-editor mentioned that “Data scientists and machine learning developers are about 3 times more likely to use Emacs than any other type of developer.” I wonder why (and I wonder how significant that result it).

I'm surprised by how high Notepad++ ranks; I don't know much about the other editors (apart for Visual Studio and Eclipse). I wonder if these results reflect the popularity of certain languages; for example, Visual Studio does have features that Emacs lacks for .Net development (is it the same for Eclipse|IntelliJ/Java?). On the other hand, Vim and Notepad++ don't fall in that category.

Clément.


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Re: Results of StackOverflow developer survey,Results of StackOverflow developer survey

[Chris Zheng]

Hello Clément,
> Hi emacs-devel,
> 
> StackOverflow (a programming Q&A website) recently run a user survey, including a question about IDEs; they got about 50'000 responses.
> 
> The results are at https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-development-environments . About 5% of programmers who care to share use Emacs as one of their IDEs; the most popular are Visual Studio and Notepad++ (35% each), followed by SublimeText, Vim, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and others (Emacs is #15 on that list).
> 
> Interestingly, the 2015 survey at https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-editor mentioned that “Data scientists and machine learning developers are about 3 times more likely to use Emacs than any other type of developer.” I wonder why (and I wonder how significant that result it).
> 
> I'm surprised by how high Notepad++ ranks; I don't know much about the other editors (apart for Visual Studio and Eclipse). I wonder if these results reflect the popularity of certain languages; for example, Visual Studio does have features that Emacs lacks for .Net development (is it the same for Eclipse|IntelliJ/Java?). On the other hand, Vim and Notepad++ don't fall in that category.

I’m a former Notepad++ user. In my opinion, the Notepad++ ranks 1st because:

1) It targets MS-Windows. The MS-Windows users are huge, so there are many potential users.
2) It likes Notepad, the default editor in MS-Windows. So learning Notepad++ is not a problem.
3) It is fast and light.
4) It can support a wide range of languages.

Hope this helps,
Chris
> Clément.

RE: Results of StackOverflow developer survey

[Drew Adams]

This belongs more on Tangents than on Emacs Devel (IMHO).

(If you reply, please consider removing emacs-devel from the cc list.)

Re: Results of StackOverflow developer survey

[Tom]

Clément Pit--Claudel <clement.pit <at> gmail.com> writes:

> I wonder if these results reflect the popularity of certain
> languages; for example, Visual Studio does have features that
> Emacs lacks for .Net development (is it the same for
> Eclipse|IntelliJ/Java?

It would be interesting to see editor usage by language/platform.

Emacs is less suited for platforms where IDE support is important.
E.g. I'm dabbling in Android development and I use Android Studio
for that and I miss my usual emacs tools. But Android projects have
lots of small boring details which Android Studio takes care of, so
using emacs in this case would not be practical unless I want to 
set up everything manually.

Emacs does not really have a future in these areas unless an out of
the box experience similar to Android Studio is created, which is 
possible in theory, but someone has to do it. Android developers
who want to be productive quickly just download Android Studio and
others won't bother implementing things like this for emacs.

So emacs has more chance with languages/areas which are still 
done with manually edited Makefiles and stuff. But in those cases
where your target is a huge platform which has to be preconfigured
in various ways, an integrated IDE provides a better development
experience.