
State.of.dev – Explore the current state of development - chillax
https://stateofdev.com/
======
inconshreveable
I love the _idea_ of this: that there is a place you could go to get a pulse
on the opinions of technology professionals regarding the tools they're
working with.

So I apologize for the negativity that follows; it's a cool idea, and you've
put work into it and made it look very pretty. That being said: unfortunately,
without it being backed up by _data_, this is just one person's opinion and
ultimately not very worthwhile as is.

Furthermore the presentation of the data along a single axis 'adoption' (or
sometimes 'expectation') is even more confusing. Technology comparisons are
not helpful plotted on a single variable as the comparator. It also leads to
some very bizzare plots where somehow 'mariadb' has more 'adoption' than
'mysql' or 'postgres'

~~~
falsedan
Yeah, this is ThoughtWorks' Technology Radar[0] with an axis missing.

[0]: [https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar](https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar)

~~~
tedmiston
This is an epic resource. Thanks for sharing.

Direct link to the most recent report with tools and commentary (PDF):
[https://assets.thoughtworks.com/assets/technology-radar-
nov-...](https://assets.thoughtworks.com/assets/technology-radar-
nov-2016-en.pdf)

~~~
cowardlydragon
No organization could adopt what they recommend. 75% of the "adiot" class
disappears in six months

It is good for buzzword bingo awareness.

------
dfansteel
I have a lot of trouble believing that the author of this page has much
experience with iOS development. As such it calls into question the rest of
their evaluations. Cocoa programming is the place I can speak intelligently,
so I'm going to limit my remarks to that.

Let's start with Objective-C which is being listed as "Enlightenment" on the
cusp of "Productivity". Objective-C has been around for 30 years. Check out
the Swarm Library. An Objective-C library developed first in the 90's for
research into CA. I won't go into the whole history, but it's been a
productive language since the mid 90's.

In Text Editors, Xcode is listed as "Challenged" by what? There's no mention
of AppCode at all. The Cocoa IDE marketplace is so small I cannot name another
editor without going to google. Listing it as "Challenged" may appeal to
people who aren't experienced with it, but it's still the accepted tool for
Cocoa development.

For iOS Development... I know React Native is popular among newcomers, almost
exclusively because they'd rather not learn a new language, but I can name
exactly 0 mobile professionals who use it. Yes, I know Facebook uses it.
Facebook apps are objectively terrible. They get away with it because React
Native is moderately better than mobile web.

/rant

~~~
StavrosK
And GraphQL is listed as a database... I would take these charts with a huge
grain of salt, they seem to basically be a single person ballparking things on
a curve.

------
meesterdude
the problem with this is it's opinions of the creator, presented as imperial
fact - as if it's actually representative.

This is dangerous, because people who are easily mislead will see this and
become java developers - or hire only .net developers, because they saw that
graph.

I've browsed around - every one of these graphs is completely irrational,
tells nothing substantive, or are misleading at the least. There are _some_
truths scattered about, but by and large it's largely nonsense.

Graphs tell a story - and every one of those stories is either entirely made
up, or has some pretty disputable results.

there IS a story to tell, but it takes more than a graph to tell it. There's a
lot of "it depends"

I don't mean to gutpunch the author. I strongly disagree with this project -
but commend the effort. the design is clear and straightforward, and it's
another project shipped. That's certainly worth something.

edit:

from the related writeup:

> What makes this visualisation so attractive, is that it provides you with a
> starting point for understanding and exploring a certain market and it’s key
> technologies.

> That information can help you decide whether to either invest your time and
> money into an emerging technology, or wait for the hype to pass.

this is _exactly_ the kind of takeaways you should not be making from these
graphs.

~~~
fudged71
It would have been better to host an industry survey first and then plot
results based on it.

~~~
meesterdude
This is a great idea! I really like this. But the audience needs to be clear,
and the method of gathering unbiased.

Maybe I would say, something like "you would use PHP when _____" or "you would
reach for flexbox when _______" as a survey methodology. Because that's kinda
how it is for a lot of things. The give & take needs to be captured.

Maybe some way of check boxing priorities. Like, I care about maintainable
code, or cheap developers, or high concurrency, or good track records. All
that would be really useful in helping establish a direction for a developer
and a company researching directions.

------
pc86
Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to have much experience with the .NET
ecosystem.

Referring to F Sharp as "#F"; saying Visual Studio is in the "growth" phase;
no mention of IIS under web server or SQL Server under database or Xamarin
under any of the relevant mobile sections.

Overall I like the visualizations though

~~~
dfansteel
I had similar feeling regarding their experience with iOS.

------
yvoschaap2
I build this as a side project. I enjoy doing research for certain topics, and
usually end up drawing a graph that positions all concepts so I get a good
understanding of a market.

I build a tool around that, which became State.of.dev.

Read more about its future plans: [https://medium.com/@yvoschaap/state-of-
dev-c609cc12084b](https://medium.com/@yvoschaap/state-of-dev-c609cc12084b)

~~~
FooBarWidget
Thanks for building this! What data did you base the graphs on? Did you
extract these data from Gartner reports? If so, which ones?

Although I see a bunch of things on the graph, I don't know what they imply.
For example I see Heroku in the "challenged" state -- challenged by whom? As
far as I know Heroku is still big and growing.

And I see PostgreSQL being "more challenged" than MySQL. What backs up this
claim? I get the feeling that PostgreSQL is getting significantly more buzz
and development after the fall of MySQL (as a result of the Oracle takeover).

I also see containers being on the verge of being challenged. But I thought
containers are still very much up and coming? So I'm confused.

More explanation would definitely help.

~~~
yvoschaap2
All valid questions.

re: context chart and states. The y-axis mentions "adoption". Which is the
market adoption of an item. If you click a state, I explain what that state
mean. I'm certain this can be improved. So for your example Heroku: Yes they
could be growing, I'm not saying they aren't, but they've come into a state
where their service is strongly challenged by competitors (usually left in the
chart, AWS, Google Cloud).

Re: PostgreSQL and Containers. Those are my opinion in this release. I would
see state.of.dev evolve into expert/community consensus based on arguments and
actual chart releases.

~~~
mugsie
Containers is still very much in growth, for the majority of deployments.

VMs would be mature, and bare metal would challenged / superseded.

Remember that 90% (a number that is completely take out of thin air, but a
large majority) of deployments are not what we see on HN, lobsters etc.

They don't understand why you would have a VM, let alone a container.

I have seen feature requests recently for zero downtime migrations of
containers, as "some apps cannot be stopped and started" \- that is how
enterprise sees containers.

~~~
AstralStorm
Hate to break it to you, but for high performance only specialised hardware
works. Sometimes even only local hardware. Or even a full cluster that only
uses VMs or containers as a nice migration of availability layer.

Internet bandwidth and latencies kill clouds while there is no real gain to be
had by running multiple heavy compute services on one machine. (as much as
certain gpgpu companies want you to believe)

Bare metal superceded, ha. It is just augmented with an availability layer.

------
diegoprzl
Visual Studio in growth?

Atom/Vim/Sublime in maturity?

Eclipse/Xcode/Emacs challenged?

Emacs almost superseded? Superseded by what exactly?

At least the text editor section doesn't make any sense to me. Atom more
mature than Emacs/Eclipse/Visual Studio? Visual Studio Code is in growth,
Visual Studio is a very mature product.

~~~
akerro
>Emacs almost superseded? Superseded by what exactly?

VIM HA! That whole chars is completely dumb. It's comparing oranges to pears.
VisualStudio works on Windows, Emacs, Vim work on every platform, are hackable
and opensource etc. etc. The chats is called 'text editors' ha, VS and Eclipse
are not really text editors, they're full-featured IDEs, with integrated
debugger and stuff. I can't stop seeing those charts as someone's imagination
how tech looks like, it's not even supported by anything like data, google
trends or even survey.

~~~
diegoprzl
Exactly. I think there should be a disclaimer saying that those charts don't
represent the actual consensus/reality and should not be taken at face value.
They're not accurate and even conflate categories/products which are not
comparable.

~~~
untoreh
if you focus on the y axis and ignore the x axis then it kinda of makes sense,
mostly because the adoption trend is not related to the lifetime of the
subject in this case, like it can be for programming languages and the likes.

------
idop
Nice project, needs a bit of work though, mostly in the form of explaining the
data in the graphs.

Also, two points: * It's SQLite, not SqlLite. * Yeoman has been around for
ages and I've never met a person who actually uses it. How is it under
"Release"?

~~~
Cthulhu_
I've used Yeoman in a few projects, but realistically I've only seen it used
to bootstrap a project, and I happen to do longer running projects so there's
not much bootstrapping. A second use case of Yeoman is generating components,
and we do have a set of templates to do that in our project, but honestly I'm
old-fashioned and inefficient and just copy / paste an existing component
instead of try and figure out how Yeoman works again and iterating on the
templates. Might be different if we added new components more often.

------
k__
It's a bit strange that most of the used graphs imply some kind of
chronoligical order.

First Hype, than disillusionment etc.

But some things, like the waterfall model were considered productive once and
aren't now.

Also, GraphQL isn't a databse but an API layer/protocol.

~~~
yvoschaap
The Hype Cycle Chart you refer too is based on the Gardner model (which is a
decade old): >
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

Waterfall is stuck in 'disillusionment', and didn't move forward into
enlightenment/productivity. Again, this should get more context on the
arguments and context of why something is where :)

~~~
k__
Ah okay, even if it's old, I still think this form of representation is
misleading.

------
badosu
Could anyone clarify why PostgreSQL is _challenged_? Challenged by who?

No sarcasm intended, I am a bit confused by this.

~~~
fiatjaf
By NoSQL.

~~~
scient
Oh you and your jokes...

~~~
fiatjaf
I think that's what he meant, this is not what I think.

------
thehardsphere
I think the idea of having some site like this has some merit to it, but this
idea of plotting them on these graphs is misleading and inappropriate.

The graphs are drawn as line charts, with everything being points on the line.
This creates the illusion that every technology goes through a lifecycle
between all of these states in the exact same path. This is utter nonsense.

Take for instance, your technology graph, where you list "Augmented Reality"
as being in the "Disillusionment" phase. Being a point on the curve, along
with every other point on the curve, it's implicit that someday "Augmented
Reality" may move to be more widely adopted in the "Productivity plateau." But
that may never happen; it may just end up being a fad that Nintendo tried to
make money off of and never really succeeded at. Nevermind that it's debatable
what "productivity" is for a concept like AR.

These graphs also give no real useful information on their Y-axis. It's not
really useful to know if the author thinks that Swift is about to peak and
that Java has plataued. It may be extremely useful to know how many people are
starting new Swift projects, relative to other langauges in the same niche
(e.g. Obj-C, maybe Java if you want to include Android? Idk it's not my
niche). That might be information someone can use to decide whether they
should start a project in Swift or do something else.

Also, the selection of these charts themselves is a little odd. Why a chart
devoted just to PHP frameworks? Is this the State of Dev or the state of
people who only know one language and read about the rest in school?

~~~
manojlds
State of Dev as the author saw fit. No one can come up with State of Dev that
will accommodate everything ,not even the ThoughtWorks tech radar.

Also, the last line:

> State.of.dev is still a work in progress. Have feedback? Ping me at
> @yvoschaap.

~~~
thehardsphere
> State of Dev as the author saw fit. No one can come up with State of Dev
> that will accommodate everything ,not even the ThoughtWorks tech radar.

I disagree. There are ways you could come up with the State of Dev in ways
that are more objective than one guy's opinion. Like, the StackOverflow dev
survey.

>Also, the last line: >> State.of.dev is still a work in progress. Have
feedback? Ping me at @yvoschaap.

Yvoschaap is here reading the comments and has already replied, so he can
benefit from my feedback here or ignore it as he pleases.

Even then, that doesn't preclude me from discussing it here; this is a place
where people discuss things they see.

~~~
yvoschaap2
Yes, reading and absorbing the feedback.

The current charts are a starting point. To re-emphasize (from the linked blog
post) I would love it to evolve to an community/expert consensus based on
transparant arguments.

------
hyporthogon
Gartner/Forrester approach is great but I think a little more useful for the
business planning side (the time dimension is more about market value).
Similar vein but more on the 'tech worth checking out/playing with/deploying
in-prod' side (panel opinion):
[https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar](https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar)

~~~
AstralStorm
Read up the verification of the Forrester approach. It has failed to predict
anything important yet. A simple differential model like this is no good.

Likewise gaussian cupola models are often wrong. You might be facing a sigmoid
instead. Or a stepwise distribution.

Both of these are used by alleged econometrists and planners who do not know
better and hate drawing real histograms of opinions, because that takes actual
data collection.

Thoughtworks one is even less descriptive and more limited.

------
soft_dev_person
A fun little site. But how is Sublime in "Release"?

~~~
yvoschaap2
I would love to see these charts evolve into a expert/community effort with
releases. Including arguments why items are in certain states.

Sublime's position is a bug!

------
sotojuan
That there is no JS framework in "mature" after a decade or so of SPAs says a
lot :-)

I wouldn't call Ember "challenged" though, since it's evolving constantly and
adding features inspired by a lot of new tools.

~~~
swalsh
It might, but I think it's equally possible he's right. For example, had
Angular 2 not come out the way it did... it probably WOULD be in the mature
column (I personally have found myself extremely productive in it), but
adoption was hindered after people found out about the breaking changes in 2.0
(I personally hesitated for the last 2 years to start a new project in it).
React is close to mature, but I kind of get the feeling it's accelerating not
because of it's own merits, but rather it filled a vacuum. Adoption not earned
by being "the best", but rather "the product everyone is talking about" does
not bode well in the long term. Don't get me wrong, I think React has a lot of
positive qualities, but I think a good framework should make a problem no more
complex than the problem itself is. If you start using flux frameworks etc (as
is expected with React) I really start to feel like I'm wasting time on things
that are not the problem I'm trying to solve.

------
mkj
What no c++? Perhaps it should be stateofwebdev.com. Or web.stateofdev.com ;)

------
vinceguidry
I love this. I especially like how insights fall out of the presentation. For
example, looking at the Product Development graph, there isn't anything that's
really an innovation trigger there. Not seeing something there makes the mind
want to put something there, and there is your insight on the status of
Product Development methodologies; a space ripe for disruption.

------
nurettin
Are those statistical distributions? One looks like a bell curve, but I don't
recognize the other.

~~~
yvoschaap2
Actually based on the Hype Cycle
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

------
fiatjaf
I like it, but it is just your opinion, right? It is strange to have a website
for that.

------
known
Vey interesting compilation; I really like it; Thank you;

------
vishbin
What is the data source for the graphs ?

------
raulk
GraphQL is _not_ a database.

------
rbanffy
Emacs challenged?! Nonsense! ;-)

------
ommunist
Looks like no build tools on maturity plateau, also no design patterns there.

