JetBrains has just published its annual survey on the current state of the development ecosystem, for which it interviewed almost 7,000 programmers in early 2019 to identify the most popular programming languages and current trends.

The most important key points come to coincide with something that has become standard in recent years: Java, JavaScript and Python are still the favorite languages of developers, but every time arousing more interest, Go is emerging as one of the languages more promising and that many are considering adopting or even migrating to it.

Go Go Developers

Go is a young language, and this rise in interest for it is consistent with other indicators, such as the PYPL index that measures the popularity of languages according to the number of tutorials that are searched for, where Go is gradually increasing.

Likewise, the 2019 Developer Skills Report of HackerRank, put Go as the main programming language that developers want to learn this year, and we can add the last report of Hired that shows Go at the top in programming languages most currently demanded by companies when interviewing candidates.

The JetBrains survey numbers have 13% of developers wishing to adopt or migrate to Go, a language that went from being used by only 8% of respondents in 2017, to 18% two years later, more than double.

The most popular, the most used, the most studied

But while Go continues its ascent among developers, the usual favorites remain almost unmovable: Java, JavaScript, Python and C # are still the most appreciated, and also the most used as primary language.

Python is also the most studied, 27% of respondents have started learning Python or continued their education in this language in the last 12 months.

Of these 7,000 programmers interviewed, 40% use JavaScript, 34% use Java, 27% use Python, and 15% use C #. Among all those, there are 44% of users who use Java and only Java as the only language, while in the case of JavaScript, only 17% live with it as a primary only.

Other interesting data of the survey have to do with the tools that the programmers use, and in the case of the Windows operating system it came out winning with 57% of the respondents, but macOS and Linux are also used by 49 and 48% of the programmers respectively.

89% of the developers personalize their IDEs in some way, 80% use some collaboration tool for their source code, 75% use a IDE alone, 71% use a light desktop editor, and 83% use them love the dark theme and prefer it when writing code.

Oh, and 52% of the programmers responded that they write code in their dreams.