JetBrains conducts one of the largest yearly developers surveys, along with StackOverflow. Given its breadth (over 30K developers), the survey is significant for the industry overall, even if skewed towards the communities and programming languages they offer IDEs and tools for. Also the largest amount of respondents (59%) are under 30, which might not represent the overall developers population. You can read the summary at:

www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/

The key take away is not a surprise, with JavaScript leading the programming languages in popularity, Python growing and Java maintaining a key spot in the ranking. (I personally don’t consider HTML and SQL as “programming languages”, but that’s a separate point).

Delphi is present with a small 1%, but given the target audience that’s significant. Now what’s very interesting to me is the details about which platforms Delphi developers target. Considering that overall web development (backend and frontend) is well above desktop and mobile, for Delphi we can see the following split (among developers using it):

• Desktop = 83%
• Mobile = 33%
• Web (Back-end) = 61%
• Web (Front-end) = 52%

One interesting element in this data is that among all languages in the survey Delphi has the strongest desktop focus (that is, no other languages is used as much for desktop development): next at 61% are Visual Basic and Assembly.

A final interesting piece of information is the following: “Delphi is the primary language of 3% of the developer population in Brazil”. We might get more from the raw data, but the survey is a treasure trove of information about developers, their tools and their lifestyle… including favorite drink by age 😉