[eclipse.org-architecture-council] SO survey

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/21/2016 08:24 AM, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:

Just one comment here - that survey looks so completely foobar it hurts.

The OS stats goes against every other stat available on this area.
If OSX really is 26% of their users then its weird 35% prefer a Windows only dev environment (Visual Studio).

Unless stack overflow would also publish the actual OS usage stats they track I seriously
distrust that survey.

Some other indicators allowing to question the reliability and usefulness of generalizing this survey results:
* OSX is not 26% of the IDE market, but 9 to 10% according to various metrics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers )
* 55% _javascript_ on SO; when TIOBE says 2.33% (as main programming language)
* Eclipse is downloaded about 7 to 8M times for each maintenance version. We can estimate a user base of about 7 to 8M people for Eclipse IDE (some download it multiple times, some other simply try updates so I count 1 dl == 1 user as a rough estimation). Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get download stats for IntelliJ nor Android Studio; I vaguely remember some 2 millions users of IntelliJ last year but didn't manage to find out the source

This survey result actually show that SO survey are not representative of the whole development world, it's only representative of the set of people who answered this survey, and this set is not a good sample of the whole developers population.

If someone knows a good way to get Android Studio and/or JetBrains IDEs download stats, please share the link.

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
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