Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row

Python still popular. Visual Basic for Applications liked about as much as meetings

It seems coders cannot get enough of Rust, according to a survey conducted by dev saviours Stack Overflow.

The 2019 survey had almost 90,000 (a bit down on the 100,000 from 2018) developers venting their collective spleen on life, languages and loathings.

While speed and safety-focused C++-alike Rust retained its crown as the most-beloved language by developers for the fourth year in a row, Python and TypeScript moved to second and third place respectively, sending Kotlin to fourth.

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) was unsurprisingly the language developers really, really didn't want to have to keep using while Python and JavaScript topped the list of languages that developers want to start working with.

For developer environments, the cross-platform editor Visual Studio Code extended its lead over stablemate Visual Studio to 50.7 per cent versus 31.5 per cent. The figures represent a leap from 2018's 34.9 per cent for the former and a drop from 34.3 per cent for the latter.

Last week's release of Visual Studio 2019 is unlikely to do much to puff away the head of steam that Microsoft's open-source editor has built up.

As far as web frameworks are concerned, developers would happily continue using React.js. Drupal and jQuery, on the other hand, head up the list of frameworks that devs would prefer to not poke with a long, sharp stick.

In terms of salaries, while developers coding in F# topped the global charts in 2018, trousering a median $74,000, the language was pushed in second place in 2019 by Clojure, with the lovers of the Lispy language pocketing a median $90,000. In the US, Clojure was pushed to second place despite coders picking up a cool median $139,000 salary. Scala was instead flavour of the month, with respondents claiming a $143,000 packet.

Finally, in what will be a surprise to no one, developers reckoned a distracting work environment was a productivity killer, as were meetings. Interestingly, men reckoned non-development work was a bigger pain than meetings, while women were more tired of interminable meetings when there was coding to be done. ®