“Stack Overflow reports that more developers now use OS X than Linux as their primary OS, and that if the trend continues, fewer than half of all developers will be using Windows next year,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac.
Last year, Mac edged ahead of the Linuxes as the number 2 operating system among developers. This year it became clear that trend is real. If OS adoption rates hold steady, by next year’s survey fewer than 50% of developers may be using Windows. — Stack Overflow
Lovejoy reports, “The site says it carried out ‘the most comprehensive developer survey ever conducted,’ with more than 56,000 coders across 173 countries taking part.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The times they are a-changin’.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Where is Monkey Boy when you need him……
Ask and you shall receive. Let’s rock.
LOL!!!
I liked Teddy better. Hope this isn’t set in stone.
This makes sense and is totally in line with what I see every day. However, once the code is pushed for testing, QA, and deployment, that work is still done almost exclusively on Linux.
Why?
That makes no sense.
What value does Linux add ?
OS X has or can have via port, any tool that Linux has.
You’re not considering all of the back end infrastructure that most applications rely on like databases. Yes, you can install MySQL on a Mac, but it runs much faster, much cleaner, and more reliably with less overhead on Linux. Also, continuous integration software like Jenkins and Circle CI run more reliably on Linux. Provisioning tools like Chef, Puppet, and Salt also run better on Linux. There’s a whole ecosystem of support tools that developers use behind the code. Most developers house that infrastructure in AWS and scale accordingly. Look, I’m an Apple fan boy til death, but there are things that Linux just does better. Server and development infrastructure are just a few.
I must have missed something. Why would any developer write and test code on Linux if the destination platform is not Linux? Did this report fall out of an alternate dimension?
The tools are becoming more cross platform with each release.
Its common to see android development done on Linux and I know people who use Xamarin Studio on Windows and they deploy to iOS and Android.
Even Microsoft recognizes the shift and has released Visual Studio Code which is a pretty good editor for OS X and Linux.
With languages like c# and Swift now becoming open source the way developers target platforms is changing. Its becoming less about what OS you run your software on and more about the development framework.
Cool times.
Cool indeed! So C# is going open source? How kind of Microsoft. I’ve only heard of Xamarin and never looked into it.
.net core was open sourced over a year ago. A good chunk of C# has been open source for years now as an ECMA standard. Its how the Mono framework has had c# for so long.
Microsoft announced they are buying Xamarin, which makes sense since Xamarin wrote quite a nice code layer for deploying to iOS.
Xamarin studio is pretty wicked. You can deploy to native apps to Android, iOS and Windows from largely the same c# code.
That’s probably how I heard of Xamarin. Clearly, I’m out of touch with the Microsoft coding community.
I’m thinking that all this has something to do with Microsoft’s idealistic claims that they were going to offer universal coding tools to their developers. I remember their hopes and dreams fell through and they withdrew their claims. But I expect buying Xamarin was the impetus.
(I’m in need of coffee, but I seem to recall they were going to offer a way to port Android and iOS apps to Windows 10 phones but it never happened).
This trend is developing much slower as it could be. As a more than 25 year MacOS X and iOS developer I can tell you from personal experience that the current state of MacOS X is disappointingly unreliable. If Apple would seriously address the bugs that are popping up on a daily basis, even doing mundane things, and provide more solid support in their hardware and software for professionals, I am sure Mac sales in the professional segment would virtually explode. Instead of focusing on a rock solid OS, they keep adding frivolous “features” that nobody asked for. They seem to be more interested in the next eye popping candy for kids than to stand behind “Macs always work” slogan. That focus is clearly a thing of the past at Apple. Interestingly, right now, the market seems to be very willing to buy Apple computers and has completely changed their mind from the time when the common thought was: “if it is not on Windows we won’t touch it”. But I don’t see Apple capitalizing on that. More and more they treat the Mac as a consumer product and are clearly dumbing the product down. And yes, my whole company is very dedicated to using Apple products and all our software runs solely on Macs (at this time…).
Considering that the Mac OS X public beta was released in late 2000, and the first iOS SDK in 2008, having 25 years’ experience as a developer means you must have a working time machine.
Even adding the two together doesn’t come to 25 years.
Really ? I have been a Mac developer since 1985, where were you ?
I stuck with Apple when pretty much everyone gave up and ran over to the Windows camp as I strongly believed in the philosophy of the original founders of the company.
Since the moment that the iOS SDK was announced I started development on that platform as well.
So actually far over 25 years.
Without specific examples, you’re just bloviating.
Uhm, if I would have to post that list here it would probably take at least 4 full pages. But to give you an idea:
– WiFi broken (even more so with the latest release of 10.11)
– File transfer to other Macs (including servers) of large amounts, broken
– Bonjour, severely broken (even more so in 10.11, last reliable version in Snow Leopard)
– Messages, severely broken particularly iChat
– Mail, broken (just try to delete docs that you have added as an attachment to a mail. Even after sending it, mail keeps an unexplained lock on the file until you quit it)
– Handoff, never worked reliably
You want me to keep going on ?
pacemaker, which replaced ntpd to keep the system clock accurate, is utterly broken, so Mac clocks gradually drift away from accuracy without being corrected.
I never knew that Xcode was available for Linux.
The developers I know who use Linux generally write for Linux
My handoff, Messages, and all work fine. I couldn’t ask for a better computer than this Mac.
Also, I’m glad more developers use Mac now. More developers means more software. So keep ’em coming, pal!