A wide-ranging new survey has revealed interesting insights into the coding preferences of Mac (opens in new tab) developers.
The 2021 Mac Developer Survey surveyed more than 4000 programmers from over 90 countries and was conducted by Tower, which operates a Git client of the same name.
According to the report, while most Mac developers do full-stack web development (opens in new tab) (26.3%), those that develop iOS mobile apps (opens in new tab) make up a quarter of the surveyed individuals.
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Interestingly, despite working on a closed source platform, a majority of them contribute in some way or the other to open source (opens in new tab) projects.
Language soup
Perhaps the most amusing fact is that contrary to popular belief, it is JavaScript (opens in new tab) that’s the most preferred language by Mac developers instead of Swift.
The developers working on JavaScript (54.6%) far outnumber the ones that work on the Swift programming language (31.9%) developed by Apple. Even more surprising is the revelation that a large number of Mac developers work with PHP (25.6%), and Python (opens in new tab) (24%).
In the same vein, while the number of Mac developers who expressed interest in working with Swift leads the pack at just over 28%, those interested in mastering Go (23.4%), Rust (23.2%), and Python (21.8%) make up a sizeable chunk as well.
In terms of their choice of text editors (opens in new tab) and integrated development environments (IDEs), it’s no surprise that Visual Studio Code (opens in new tab) with 56.7% and Xcode with 33.8% are the favorites.
Similarly, the fact that 76% of the developers use GitHub to host their code isn’t surprising. What does raise eyebrows though is that slightly over 10% of Mac developers prefer to host their code themselves.
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