61% of Developers Worldwide Spend Four Hours or Less Daily on Programming as They Grapple with Security, Stability and Managing Dependencies

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – May 7, 2019 – Developers are spending even less time on programming and the majority – 62% – are still struggling with managing dependencies when it comes to open source languages. That’s according to the findings of ActiveState’s 2019 Developer Survey: Open Source Runtimes.

The second annual survey includes responses from 1,250 developers in 88 countries, the majority (65%) of whom identify as professional developers. With these insights, ActiveState helps developers to use open source languages securely, quickly and efficiently with minimized risk and enhanced oversight. Download the full report here: https://tinyurl.com/y4f4rza3

Click to Tweet: 2019 Developer Survey from @activestate examines open source runtime pains: https://tinyurl.com/y4f4rza3 #opensource

Key findings of this year’s survey include:

Developers are still wasting time on retrofitting languages to comply with enterprise criteria

  • More than 61% of respondents spend four hours or less per day programming, a nearly 20% decrease in time spent programming from 2018
  • 65% of respondents said they don’t contribute to or maintain open source projects; nearly half of them – 49% – blamed a lack of time
  • 52% ranked adding or incorporating a new language as difficult to very difficult

Enterprise IT departments lack visibility into new security threats and struggle to track code in production for required updates, patches and new vulnerabilities

  • 41% experienced some or a lot of problems ensuring security is up-to-date with the latest or most secure version of every package
  • 40% experienced some or a lot of problems building new, stable releases that behave the same as old releases
  • Bottlenecks and approval processes were ranked as the third and fourth biggest problems for developers

Popularity and satisfaction aren’t always connected when it comes to open source languages

  • Developers use SQL the most often day to day, but Python has the highest satisfaction levels
  • 80% of respondents use SQL the most, followed by Javascript at 77% and Python at 72%
  • 77% were satisfied or very satisfied with using Python, followed by C# ranked at a satisfaction level of 68%

Bart Copeland, President and CEO, ActiveState, said: “Open source languages drive innovation, but developers struggle with managing dependencies and adding new languages securely and efficiently. ActiveState has been working in open source for over 20 years, and we’re passionate about making open source easy for enterprises. We hope that by identifying the pain points developers face, better methods and solutions can be found so developers can get back to programming.”

About ActiveState
ActiveState helps enterprises scale securely with open source languages and gives developers the kinds of tools they love to use. More than 2 million developers and 97 percent of Fortune 1,000 enterprises use ActiveState to support mission-critical systems and speed up software development while enhancing oversight and increasing quality. https://www.activestate.com/

 

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