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//from the editor/
PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ADLER/STUDIO AT GETTY IMAGES FOR ORACLET
he largest survey ever done of Java developers
(with some 10,500 responses) contains numer-
ous data points worthy of thoughtful consider-
ation. To be sure, many of the data points confirm
suppositions we have had about the industry in
general, but a few surprises stand out. Here are my
thoughts on them.
JVM Languages. This question inquired
about the principal JVM language used by respon-
dents. As you’d expect, Java came in first by a
wide margin. The big surprise is that Clojure,
the functional-style JVM language, came in sec-
ond, beating out Kotlin and Groovy by a whisker
and ahead of Scala by a somewhat larger margin.
Several key points add some context to these
numbers. Kotlin’s greatest adoption is on the
Android platform, where it is now an officiallysupported language. Android developers are not
likely to be well represented in Java user groups
or in Java Magazine—the two principal sources
of respondents to the survey. Likewise, it’s not
clear that Scala developers are well represented.
I expect that if we could tap the entire universe
of JVM and Android developers, the order of
popularity would be Java, Kotlin, Scala, and then
Clojure. Regardless, Clojure is an unexpected sur-
prise and shows that functional programming has
many adherents; its popularity also suggests that
the Java team’s focus on adding functional-style
elements to Java (notably, lambdas and streams) is
in tune with developer preferences.
Static Analysis. Currently, 36% of develop-
ers don’t use static checking tools at all. This is
hard to explain, because studies have repeatedlyUnexpected Results from the
Java Developer Survey
Large surveys surface results that belie the common wisdom.#developersruledeveloper.oracle.comGet on the list
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