Stack Overflow surveys thousands of programmers every year. The resulting report has become an interesting reference to know the current state of different programming languages ​​and technologies. It may seem that everything has not changed much from year to year, but yes.

JavaScript, most used, SQL rising. A decade after the first survey, one thing remains the same: JavaScript is the most widely used programming language by programmers. HTML/CSS is also widely used, but there is a surprise here with SQL which is slightly above Python.

Pay attention to the last positions. TypeScript also elevates integers and, along with Bash/Shell, surpasses another classic, Java. Rust is 14 years old and rising on the list, Clojure 32 and Erlang 37: these last two are hardly used by those surveyed, something interesting as we will see later.

traditional winners. AWS dominates cloud technologies — Node.js and React.js are the most used web frameworks, with 51% being Google Cloud (26.81%) not far behind Azure (28.72%).

The Node.js npm package manager is another classic and already popular in the 2021 poll, Docker is even more popular this year. And there are no competitors in the environments: Visual Studio Code is the code of choice, well ahead of others like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Notepad++ or Vim.

How are developers organized? Developers also spend time organizing and collaborating on projects. Jira, Confluence and Trello stand out there (Notion gains ground), while Zoom, Teams and Slack for communication are almost equally popular among programmers.

The most loved… Rust is once again by far the most popular programming language. Elixir, Clojure, TypeScript, and Julia follow this somewhat from afar, and of the popular ones, only the aforementioned TypeScript and Python (sixth among the favourites) have this intriguing but actually stable correspondence in the poll.

… and the most hated. If we go to the end of that graph, we find programming languages ​​with so much tradition that it’s hard to find experts. MATLAB, COBOL, and VBA (Visual Basic) are next, and it’s clear they don’t like it very much. It’s interesting to see the apparent little appreciation that neither Objective-C nor Fortran and programmers have, for example, for the C programming language, which is an absolute hero in the development of Linux and its components. Of course: Rust begins to gain ground.

What I want is to make a lot of money. Another remarkable result of the research is that the programming languages ​​continue to be the most money-making programming languages. There we will not find the most popular and almost the most beloved. Heroes are slightly more special and less used languages. Clojure, Erlang, F#, LISP—another well-established—, Ruby or Elixir programmers are the top earners on the market.

wages improve. At least in the US example, where salaries have risen significantly in many cases: the median salary for COBOL in 2021 was $52,340, and this year it was $75,592. Erlang increased from 80,077 to 103,000, and Rust from 77,530 to $87,047. Of course, being a developer in that country is now more profitable than a year ago. Much more than in Spain, where a “front-end developer” can earn between 39,000 and 58,500 euros per year, according to data from independent consultants.