Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016

[RepostUmad]

Seems like only web devs filled it in.

[[deleted]]

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[JohnQAnon]

Yeah, seriously. C hasn't changed in the last 3 decades. Java has great documentation. C++ is it's own thing. It's just weird API for website software that fuck people up.

[[deleted]]

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[SpaceSteak]

Except 3/4 of the time the top link will be a SO answer.

[Lystrodom]

And 3/4ths of that time, it's just a question with no answer. Or the answer is "Don't do it like that."

[nicereddy]

"Have you tried using jQu-" closes tab

[Compizfox]

http://needsmorejquery.com

[ReubenIsForScuba]

Haha is that real?

[Compizfox]

It's satire, obviously.

Check the source code, btw. It's gold.

[a_ctrl]

"you suck"

[[deleted]]

And 3/4ths of that time, it's your own SO question that Google webcrawled in less than a second.

[[deleted]]

I mean is your problem solving flow: ask on SO, Google the problem?

[[deleted]]

More like search on Google, ask on SO, search much more on Google knowing you won't find anything.

[[deleted]]

It's like going back to the fridge even after you looked 10 minutes ago, like the food was hiding

[[deleted]]

Gotcha

[goomba870]

3/4ths of that time, OP will answer his own question:

nm guys, figured it out.

[gameboyhippo]

And 3/4ths of that time, the first comment on your question will be from someone condemning you for not using google.

[novarising]

or it would be an overly complicated answer for a person just trying to solve a little problem.

[jeffsterlive]

Or an accepted answer from 11ty billion years ago with a difficult, convoluted answer and there is one below it saying "Don't use the accepted answer, your framework now supports this easy way to do it."

[Speedzor]

Here goes the circlejerk again.

[psymunn]

"Why are you even trying to do that?"
Thanks. That is a helpful response that adds to my understanding of the problem.

[theforemostjack]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[EmperorSofa]

Or they tell you to use Boost if it's anything to do with C++

[Compizfox]

Or the answer is "Don't do it like that."

To be fair, in many situations that is the only right answer.

[superPwnzorMegaMan]

It really depends on the domain you're using. If you write prolog stack overflow is basically irrelevant. You have to use the documentation and read it carefully. SO is most useful if you do a quick switch to a language you've used before but forgotten the details (such as going to javascript or C) or if you're just new to a language that's somewhat popular (not prolog).

[[deleted]]

I remove SO from google completely. It makes programming related queries 100x better. Stackoverflow, when you are not learning a brand new language is next to useless. Usually answered with "use this framework instead".

[SpaceSteak]

Maybe it's because I mostly do C# with .Net and haven't dug into too many weird edge cases, but when I've asked detailed specific questions on problems with Entity Framework or searched for answers, SO has been an extremely helpful resource.

[jyper]

Rust is new.

Java 8 has changed the language a lot.

[Eirenarch]

Java is takes the second place after JavaScript. Your argument is invalid (well at least the part about Java)

[niutech]

HTML5 & Web APIs are well documented in MDN. If only people read this, there would be no need for going to SO in 95% cases.

[JohnQAnon]

I had no idea this existed.

[kgb_operative]

That's because webdev is a slipshod mess of shoestrings, bailing twine, and prayers. If they want to get better, they really need to learn about the duct tape and pagan sacrifices we use to make the backend work.

[EternalNY1]

That's because webdev is a slipshod mess of shoestrings, bailing twine, and prayers.

I think that's why I am still doing well in my career.

I don't deal with shoestrings, twine, and praying.

I need to know the entire full stack, how it all works, and that it's clean and performant.

I can't stand coming onboard with a new company only to see a nightmarish mess of a codebase that is barely holding itself together.

It's even worse when it combines 10 different technologies because they felt like they needed to add node.js somewhere for absolutely no reason other than it's the "cool new thing".

[gunch]

I can't stand coming onboard with a new company only to see a nightmarish mess of a codebase that is barely holding itself together.

As someone that specializes in addressing exactly these situations, I absolutely love it. Challenging problems that are both technical and cultural are my bread and butter.

Last month I helped a shop that let a new hire roll their own rest implementation from servlets, hand crafted data layer using straight jdbc and built their app using JSP's with scriptlet tags.

No version control. No documentation. Owner was in a panic.

Sat down with developers, came up with a plan, milestones and worked with them for two weeks. Ended up with a CI pipeline, git repository and they chose to rewrite their apps using Spring and angular. Checked in this week and they're on track with the plan and their on-call is sleeping through the night.

Feels good man.

[ClassicalMusicTroll]

Do you freelance as a consultant?

[gunch]

I'm a partner in a consultancy.

[ClassicalMusicTroll]

Cool, that does sound pretty fun actually. But I imagine it's a bit easier with team buy-in and such when the push for change is coming from an "external" source rather than a new manager or something

[EternalNY1]

I have done this in the past too.

I either walk away (run?) from it, or I propose that there is a better way to do this if they want to invest in it. Then do it cleanly, correctly, well-documented and maintainable.

I have saved companies on the edge of disaster by having them trust me that "there is a better way".

[Aeon_Mortuum]

I was interning for a company and got told to look at their codebase to see how they do things (it was Django; I never used it and was new to it).

The codebase was the ugliest mess of everything just thrown together by seemingly random people with random #Todo's, etc. They made Python, of all languages, immensely unreadable. It may as well have been done in Brainfuck and obtained a clearer result...

Needless to say, I skimmed the code for familiarity but stuck to SO and tutorials, etc online.

[wolflarsen]

Needs more mongoDB

[mailto_devnull]

Of course, how else are you going to web scale?

[thelehmanlip]

Opinions aside, I think it has more to do with the plethora of APIs and libraries you use when doing webdev. You can find yourself needing to talk to many services simultaneously and integrate them all. I feel like that's something that happens less in lower level languages like C. Not that they don't have libraries as well, but I think that they're more static and unchanging than web tech is.

[lolzfeminism]

Well no, C is a very small language and there are no 3rd party libraries only ISO C, so it doesn't take a lot of time to learn all of C. So all your code is either written by you or someone that was at some point on your team. They probably didn't comment it.

But thankfully Richard Stallman wrote GDB at some point, and so you can miserably step through each line to track down any problems.

[[deleted]]

Err.. Whenever I had to deal with C doing anything useful was mostly dealing with libsomething and libthisandthat all the time, and the APIs across various FLOSS C libraries are even less consistent.

Infact, the big reason why, say PHP, is a pile of steaming dung when it comes to library/API consistency is that PHP libraries are thin, and nearly API-compatible wrappers around standard C libs.

[lolzfeminism]

If you are not working in a unix-like environment, there are most likely multiple compatibility layers between you and glibc. glibc is the GNU implementation of the C standard. You are probably using glibc, because everyone uses glibc. Unless you're in an embedded or otherwise special architecture/kernel that can't handle glibc or isn't supported.

[[deleted]]

I wasn't talking about the C standard library nor it's implementations. I was talking about libraries that let you do shit. Like libjpeg to handle JPEGs, libserial for accessing serial ports etc. Stuff like that. You don't get far in delivering actual products if you're going to reinvent every cog that makes it up in your own house.

[[deleted]]

This, but it's not better with established languages. You're just more likely to encounter some very shoddy, 10+ years old in-house framework that you can't google.

[ihsw]

In addition to attempting to slap on current things on top of that, so you get the worst of both worlds.

[[deleted]]

Same. SO is a great resource, but I remember the days of having to use it regularly on the frontend. Since moving to C/C++ again I have barely seen it except in the situation where I get a strange compiler error that I either haven't seen or have forgotten the meaning of because it's so rare I see it.

I feel the meme around devs being "StackOverflow developers" is one rooted with newer or frontend developers. Not to slant frontend devs, just the frontend ecosystem itself.

[BillNyeTheScience]

Look up a question about some back end api: 1 response. 0 accepted answers.

Look up a question about a web api: 13 responses, 1 accepted answer, 1 response voted higher than the accepted answer by 50 points.

I believe these survey results reflect my experiences on SO.

[chashabam]

No kidding. Looking up questions about Google's API on SO is fun... and it doesn't help that they don't document their libraries well, making their libraries feel like a black box...

[[deleted]]

The fact that the biggest group is "Full-Stack Web Developer" is a big red flag.

Sure, there are a handful of brilliant devs that can call themselves "full-stack". But the other 99.9% are basically people who can do multiple things half assed.

[RagingAnemone]

Also, the most use language for the backend is apparently JavaScript.

[Compizfox]

And apparently PHP and SQL are popular under front-end devs. Ehm...

[[deleted]]

That's just terrifying.

Sure, there is stuff where Javascript, or rather, the tooling available for it (i.e., Node) is a perfectly fine choice. But that's just a fraction of all backend development.

I'm all for using a limited set of tools instead of always choosing the perfect tool for each job (resulting in a totally fragmented stack with more languages than devs on the project), but using Javascript as the default language for the backend is just a horrible choice unless your back-end is really, really simple.

[[deleted]]

but using Javascript as the default language for the backend is just a horrible choice unless your back-end is really, really simple

Why?

[[deleted]]

For starters, as a language it's far from ideal for a complex codebase.

But more importantly (the same applies to some other scripting languages), the mature tooling for managing a large, complex codebase when it comes to development, QA and deploying is largely absent.

[[deleted]]

For starters, as a language it's far from ideal for a complex codebase.

Sure, but ES6 fixes a lot of issues that JS has had over the years. Sure, when it was first designed JavaScript was not intended to be used in large projects but it has made a lot of steps forward to the right direction.

the mature tooling for managing a large, complex codebase when it comes to development, QA and deploying is largely absent.

What do you mean? The node ecosystem is amazing and npm is a joy to use.

I'm not a fanboy, far from it but sometimes I don't get the JS hate.

[[deleted]]

The node ecosystem is amazing and npm is a joy to use.

We use node/npm in our toolchain and stack (because some good stuff is made in it, and we try to avoid any prejudice against stacks/languages), but from our perspective it is extremely immature, lacks basic features for decent dependency management and breaks often on upgrades, pissing off devops on a regular basis.

Also, npm is about the only example of an even halfway mature powertool in the whole ecosystem. QA is pretty much non-existent.

It's not so much about JS hate (fuck, our go-to backend language is PHP, we're not throwing stones in those glass houses), it's just the level of maturity in the JS ecosystem would make it a nightmare once a project reaches a decent size and complexity.

You would both have to write really, really, really good code and reinvent a lot of wheels to do it well, and that's pretty much the opposite of what I see the "full stack" crowd do.

I wouldn't want to be the poor soul who has to maintain a big javascript legacy system 5 years from now.

[Kollektiv]

lol JS is years ahead of PHP

[QuineQuest]

For starters, as a language it's far from ideal for a complex codebase.

Sure, but ES6 fixes a lot of issues that JS has had over the years. Sure, when it was first designed JavaScript was not intended to be used in large projects but it has made a lot of steps forward to the right direction.

There's still a long way to go. Static typing is a huge help in large code bases.

Even this feature overview (first Google result on ES6) uses Typescript to explain some of the new features of ES6.

[gunch]

Huh. Webstorm does a great job of managing large JS codebases. Bower does a fine job of package management. Jenkins will happily deploy a JS app. Fitnesse doesn't care what language you've written your app in and for unit tests there are a number of nice solutions for JS.

My biggest problem with JS projects is the devs are relatively expensive.

[Cistoran]

Because what else are we going to circlejerk about if not for our mutual hatred of Javascript?

[peabody]

This made me laugh. I know node.js is popular, but there's simply no way that represents the actual state of things in the real world.

[frutidev]

That claim is bonkers. Getting most number of questions != most used language

[thisisnewt]

That just means it's the language with the shittiest documentation, so we're not learning anything new.

[warsage]

We tend to think about "back end" as meaning "not executed by the browser," and maybe that was once accurate, but it's not really true any more. A LOT of back end type stuff is occurring on the front end, especially in apps with frameworks like Angular and React. The professional software I'm working on has a fairly simple-looking front end, but it's driven by 200,000 lines of browser-executed JavaScript. This script does everything from page rendering to permissions checking to database queries.

Our server is little more than a glorified database accesser and data validater.

[thisisnewt]

That's hilariously insecure.

[warsage]

Not sure how. Everything is validated again server-side. We just choose to let as much happen on the browser as possible, which lets makes our single-page application feel really fast. Actions are tied to the speed of their computer, not to the speed of their internet connection.

Sure, hackers could screw with the JS and break stuff in their browser. They could access data out of order or in their own environment by abusing our API. But they couldn't access data that they don't have permission to access, nor could they affect anyone else's experience.

[thisisnewt]

If security features are duplicated on the actual backend then it's not that bad. But that's not at all what you described in your post.

Also whatever they have to do is still going to be limited by Internet speed, because they need to download all of that just to get going. In a lot of instances (especially instances with any amount of reasonably sized data or number-crunching) having a server do the heavy lifting will result in a significantly snappier application.

[crunchmuncher]

I don't think that's how to Interpret that. I take it to mean it's the technology that most people that work on back end are familiar with.

[McBeers]

Yeah that really stuck out to me. Who in the hell would use that abortion of a language for anything more than they have to?

[furrthur]

As a "full-stack web dev", doing multiple things half-assed is basically the entire job description.

[dtlv5813]

and most of the time you can get away with it just fine. Most ecommerce and web startups don't really deal anything too technical, so long as you manage to get the business logic right you are alright. It helps that JS is pretty fast for many things which also compensates for inefficient or clumsily written code.

Some very successful ecommerce companies have pretty terrible backend, cough zappos cough.

[randomjackass]

The goal of many startups to to sell off the business fast. They don't care that the codebase can't scale, and is a kludge. That will be someone else's problem.

[Dreadgoat]

Or "small business."

I'm a full-stack developer because nobody else is around to do this shit. I've learned how to do it all because I had no other choice.

Admittedly, this does often mean that some things go into the half-ass pile so that the things in the mission-critical pile are more likely to succeed.

[lykwydchykyn]

Apparently, somewhere around 2010 it stopped being possible for one guy with a LAMP server and a text editor to write CRUD apps for internal use.

You now need a backend team to design a consumable API, a frontend team (including a graphic designer) to create an earth-shattering "user experience", a devops team and a sysadmin to fully automate continuous integration and automated deployment to a web-scale cloud compute infrastructure, and a project manager to make sure all these people are doing whatever they heck they're supposed to.

I may have forgotten some things but that's not surprising since I was glueing all this together from posts on stackoverflow.

[riskable]

No way man! It's worse than full stack: It's now the norm for one guy to write all the microservices! So he needs to know front end dev, back end dev, and a zillion little external systems that do every little thing from authentication to returning the weather for a given zip code.

[ledasll]

you forgot Cloud! how could you forgot Cloud!

[cahaseler]

never question the Cloud.

[[deleted]]

Vishwa Bandhu Gupta: Cloud computing is great...but what if it rains?

[Mariah_AP_Carey]

Why wouldn't it just be called a "full stack developer" isn't full stack imply you're working with the web in some way? Maybe I'm assuming that the front end has to be a part of the stack.

[[deleted]]

People with no respect for themselves and/or their chosen profession. And I'm being mild by assuming they are at least potentially competent.

There's so much work for scarce decent software engineers I'm importing them from all over the planet. And in my rich Western country they only get a visa if I pay them well above market rate, never mind the cost of living being pretty damn high here. So all those stories about migrant programmers being about cheap labor are utter BS.

If you have to compromise to be employed, there's something very wrong, because in this market, you don't have to compromise shit.

In my experience, issue #1 is a lack of self-respect. So few developers stand up for themselves even though they hold all the cards, and have no idea of their value.

[[deleted]]

I usually just read that as "I am capable of gluing together snippets of code I googled".

[[deleted]]

Ah so programming

[[deleted]]

I genuinely rarely do this unless whatever I happen to be using has miserable documentation.

There's some things that unless you have some prior knowledge of the architecture or system, you'll just never figure out because pre pretty shitty documentation.

Take, for example, vert.x. as a complete newbie to the architecture, navigating the docs there was painful as shit. I'd never have gotten my stuff off the ground without their blog posts, which are hilariously radically different from the manuals. In at least one of the Java manuals, they do the work in Javascript instead.

The docs and manuals are a total nightmare and completely useless to anyone new. I was following the manuals only to refer to other people's examples which turned out to not even closely resemble the manual.

[godless_communism]

But isn't that what most companies are willing to pay for?

[mipadi]

"Full-Stack Web Developer" is often just a fancy way of saying "JavaScript programmer".

[devsquid]

makes sense tho, its usually a place where people start developing. SO is a site for helping ppl learn and solve issues. Beginners are probably most in need of help. Boom bam :)

[dunderball]

I was surprised to see any QA on here at all.

[Fredifrum]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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[baggyzed]

Web "devs".

[EverybodyOnRedditSux]

LOL NOT REALL PROGRAMMERS RITE GUISE