
The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017 - mihau
https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2017/
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twobyfour
Note that these results are likely a bit skewed towards Jetbrains' customers.

The stat that surprised me most was how many people never used an issue
tracker. 28%? That's insane!

~~~
staofbur
About 50% of the companies I consulted for between 2004-2013 had no issue
tracker. Most emailed and/or emailed spreadsheets around.

What's even more shocking is about 25% of them didn't even use a VCS, most
relying on some poor guy to sit there with a diff tool and merge everyone's
shit into something cohesive. One company used a wooden spoon as an ownership
lock.

~~~
Sir_Substance
A few weeks ago, someone had a thread up asking what people did to help them
get past impostor syndrome, and I had a stab at writing up an answer that
revolved around "realise that if you read hacker news, you're probably inside
a quality bubble. Look at how bad some people who are employed in software are
at their jobs and get some perspective".

I ended up deleting the comment without posting it because I didn't have any
good examples that I felt I could talk about in detail.

This is a great one though. To everyone on hacker news, if you ever feel
inadequate about not writing as many unit tests as you know you should (or
whatever is bugging you), remember that time Staofbur found a whole company of
people so clueless they used a wooden spoon instead of version control.

Yeah you should probably write more unit tests, but overall, the fact that you
even know enough to feel worried about that makes you the cream of the
software industry. There's a whole pail of rather thin milk below you.

~~~
staofbur
Hey, the spoon worked well, until I bought another one and left it in the
office :) They had SVN running for everyone a week after and a month later
they were running feature branches.

~~~
another-dave
> "until I bought another one and left it in the office"

Ooh! You mean 'whoever has the spoon has the lock', type thing? I genuinely
presumed you meant, 'don't mess up this code with conflicts or you'll get a
smack of the wooden spoon' :D

~~~
staofbur
Yes it was a "hardware lock" i.e. the holder of the spoon was allowed to diff
their copy with the master on a file share and update that. The spoon was used
as a casual weapon to beat idiots as well in jest ;)

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aphextron
Am I alone in finding Go's syntax atrocious? It just seems so needlessly
obtuse, and puts me off to an otherwise great ecosystem.

~~~
Svenskunganka
What do you find obtuse with it? I don't care that much for syntax when
looking at a language, because it is something you can get used to fairly
quickly. The error checking is quite repetetive though.

~~~
aphextron
> I don't care that much for syntax when looking at a language, because it is
> something you can get used to fairly quickly. The error checking is quite
> repetetive though

I agree, it's entirely an aesthetic issue. Just choices like using "func"
instead of just writing out "function" or using an actual shorthand like "fn"
really bother me. Also the seemingly arbitrary choices that run against the
grain of C inspired languages like using "[]<type>" instead of "<type>[]" to
initialize an array.

~~~
amw-zero
Those examples both seem a little like nitpicking. The argument that something
is not like C is particularly interesting to me, because C has arguably the
most obtuse and unintuitive syntax out there. We just accept it as normal
because we've seen it so much.

I encourage you to look back and think about how you felt when reading your
first C for loop.

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vinceguidry
I didn't get very far reading this until I realized that because Java
developers skewed the results pretty hard, there really weren't going to be
any takeaways from it that aren't also only relevant to the Java ecosystem.

It's why I don't pay much attention to statistics in general. Nobody's
constraints are going to match how I would do it.

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AJRF
44% of developers surveyed said they don't contribute to open source code, but
are willing too.

I assume that some people say they are willing but when push comes to shove
they don't actually want too, but still seems like a gap in the market.

Someone could try and build a tool to arbitrage for the two communities.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and
time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

It's not unreasonable for someone to have hobbies other than coding outside of
work. Many people that contribute to open source end up doing so during their
free time, but I'd guess that a fair share of those 44% of developers have
different priorities.

~~~
krapp
> There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and
> time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

Companies don't allocate resources and time to employees without expecting a
return on investment. Any contributions made on company time would have to
managed by the company with the intent that they serve its needs first and
foremost, or else be considered theft of company resources and time.

It sounds like a good idea but I can't see it turning into anything but an
opportunity for companies to leverage control over open source projects.

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snomad
21% target Windows mobile OS? That seems especially high since most Windows
developers would start visual studio by default.

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petraeus
For some people writing clever clean code is much more important than making
$10 million profit a year.

What type of person are you?

