I came across a JetBrains survey that was sent out earlier this year. JetBrains is a fascinating company in its own regard. It's a Czech software company that is most well known for its IDEs (integrated developer environments) that's been around since 2000. It's also fully bootstrapped and independently owned and claims 1.8M customers.
The Data
You can read the full report here. First, a heatmap of programming language popularity over the last few years – "What programming language have you used in the last 12 months".
Impressive numbers for PHP, a language that seems old. But PHP was released in 1995, just like JavaScript, and only a year before CSS. Python (1991) and SQL (1974) are much older!
WSL Penetration is much higher than I'd expect. 20% of Windows users are using WSL in some regard. That's pretty high, considering it still has many rough edges.
What big data tools are developers using? I compared this year's results against last years'.
2021 Survey
2020 Survey
I would expect many of the Spark and Hadoop use cases to be better served by cloud-native solutions like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Kubernetes. Spark seems to be following this trend, but Hadoop is sticking around. It looks like streaming applications haven't found much use outside of Kafka.
Microsoft gaining share in analytics platforms, but no winners yet.
2021 Survey
2020 Survey
My guess as to why nobody has "won" the analytics platform war yet is because the industry is shifting away from platforms and towards a "modern data stack" that combines best-of-breed SaaS tools. It's interesting to see the correlation with Databricks/Spark usage.