Java may not be the most cloud-friendly of languages, but that hasn’t slowed down its usage, according to results from SlashData’s “State of the Developer Nation” report for the third quarter of 2022.

Just under half of the active developers worldwide (49%) reported that they use Java, compared with 39% who said so in Q3 2020 — an increase of 26%.

Other languages seeing noteworthy increases in the survey since Q3 2020 include:

• Kotlin, a favorite of mobile developers that is compatible with the Java ecosystem (from 11% to 18%, a 64% increase).
• Python, vital to data analysis and automation (from 42% to 50%, a jump of 19%).
• Rust, the much-loved C++ alternative (moving from 4% to 8%, a 100% increase).

The survey reached more than 26,000 participants in 163 countries around the world and was conducted from June through August, according to Slash Data, an analyst of the global developer community.

Java’s Dominance in Financial Services

Two other studies confirm Java’s strength. According to Tidelift’s “2022 Open Source Software Supply Chain Survey Report,” 49% of open source developers think their organization relies on Java, up from 42% in 2020.  The report also showed that the largest organizations were more like to rely on Java while the smaller ones tended toward JavaScript.

Financial services organizations are extraordinarily tied to Java. The “State of Open Source in Financial Services” reports that 50% of repositories associated with financial services developers use Java, while only 11% of all GitHub projects use Java.

A Dart and Flutter Popularity Check

One language that saw no noticeable increase in usage this year is Dart, which stayed constant at 6% usage over 2021 in the Slash Data study.

At first glance, this seems to contradict the assertion made in The New Stack by Fabrice Bellingard, vice president of product at SonarSource, that there is growing interest in Dart and Flutter for mobile. So, we looked at to Stack Overflow’s annual “Developer Survey” to get a second opinion. It turns out that the developers surveyed by Stack Overflow in 2022 also use Dart at the same 6% level.

Where Dart continues to have buzz is among developers that work on mobile projects, with 27% of the 7,634 mobile developers surveyed by Stack Overflow using the language, up from 24% in the 2021 survey. Among mobile developers, the use of the development framework Flutter rose from 27% in 2021 to 30% in 2022, an 11% increase. However, among all the developers, Flutter usage fell less than a percentage point to 13% as compared over the last year.

Heather Joslyn is features editor of The New Stack, with a special interest in management and careers issues that are relevant to software developers and engineers. She previously worked as editor-in-chief of Container Solutions, a Cloud Native consulting company, and as...

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Lawrence has generated actionable insights and reports about enterprise IT B2B markets and technology policy issues for almost 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies about open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work,...

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