Helping Developers Succeed with Open Source Languages in 2019: Global Survey Results

By Bart Copeland, CEO, ActiveState

Helping Developers Succeed

Enterprise CEOs and executives are driving digital transformation to keep pace and lead in their markets. One way to get ahead is to leverage open source, which underpins the majority of today’s software applications.

The foundational building block of development is programming languages, and almost all languages are open sourced. However, open source languages and the runtime environment are often overlooked. ActiveState has been working in open source for over 20 years, and we’re passionate about building software developers love to use and making open source easy for enterprises.  Our annual dev survey, 2019 Developer Survey, Open Source Runtime Pains, aims to better understand the challenges faced with open source runtimes.

This year we surveyed 1,250 developers across 88 countries to identify causes for loss in developer productivity and the biggest challenges identified included: adopting a language, managing package risk, and open source licenses.

The analysis of these results will help the Open Source Language Automation ecosystem as well as inform our related offerings.

Wasting time on retrofitting languages to comply with enterprise criteria

More than 61% of respondents spend just four hours or less per day programming, a nearly 20% decrease in time spent programming from 2018. Open source languages drive innovation, but their popularity also drives inefficiency and security challenges. Developers aren’t able to focus efforts on high-value work. Instead they waste time on non-coding activities like retrofitting software for security and checking license compliance after software and languages have been built.

Enterprise IT departments lack insight into new security threats

Security remains a significant concern for developers, with 41% reporting that they experienced some or a lot of problems ensuring security is up-to-date with the latest or most secure version of every project. A big part of the problem is that enterprise IT departments lack visibility into new security threats and they struggle to track code in production for required updates, patches and new vulnerabilities.

Popularity and satisfaction aren’t always connected

80% of respondents use SQL the most, followed by Javascript at 77% and Python at 72%. However, although developers used SQL the most, they were happiest with Python, aka Python achieved the highest satisfaction rating.  77% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with using Python, followed by C# ranked at a satisfaction level of 68%.

It should be no surprise that Python achieved the highest satisfaction rating. Python has proven itself to be flexible. It’s grown from a scripting solution for sysadmins to web development for programmers to the driving force behind machine learning. And since developers want to use Python, Python’s usage continues to grow. Organizations should consider what they can do to empower developers when working with their programming language of choice, including how to alleviate security, license and bottleneck challenges.

Overcoming challenges and moving forward

From the findings of our developer survey, it’s clear that developers in enterprises face many obstacles and hurdles with open source languages and runtimes. By alleviating the pain points developers deal with open source runtimes, they could spend more effort and time on high-value work, coding.

If enterprises implemented Open Source Language Automation, a systematic and automated workflow to decrease the costs and risks of managing open sources, developers would ultimately be able to spend more time coding. Furthermore, not only would developers be enabled to use the tools they choose, but enterprises would realize great returns from a speed, risk and resource perspective.

About the author

Bart Copeland is the CEO and president of ActiveState, which is reinventing Build Engineering with an enterprise platform that lets developers build, certify and resolve any open source language for any platform and any environment. ActiveState helps enterprises scale securely with open source languages and gives developers the kinds of tools they love to use.

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Bart holds a Master of Business Administration in technology management from the University of Phoenix and a mechanical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia.

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