{"id":53,"date":"2019-08-05T16:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/the-state-of-developer-ecosystem-in-2019-the-rise-of-kotlin-and-react\/"},"modified":"2021-08-11T17:46:50","modified_gmt":"2021-08-11T15:46:50","slug":"the-state-of-developer-ecosystem-in-2019-the-rise-of-kotlin-and-react","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/frontend\/mobile-dev\/the-state-of-developer-ecosystem-in-2019-the-rise-of-kotlin-and-react\/","title":{"rendered":"The state of Developer Ecosystem in 2019: the rise of Kotlin and React"},"content":{"rendered":"

JetBrains <\/b> has evolved a lot during their 15 years of existence to provide the most effective set of tools for developers to cater demands of every programming language<\/span>. If anything, this testifies their dedication towards refining and improving the developer ecosystem<\/b>.<\/p>\n

It comes as no coincidence that JetBrains possess a trusted customer base of over 6 million users and has a dedicated team<\/span> continuously working towards their mission: helping developers to work faster by automating common and repetitive tasks to enable programmers<\/span> to stay focused on code.<\/p>\n

A survey recently done by JetBrains collected information from over 7000 developers to properly identify the features<\/span> of the developer ecosystem. It was a comprehensive survey covering every aspect to gather data<\/span> about all popular programming languages<\/span>, to identify the types of applications developed the most, what is the primary programming language<\/span> or the most used one for each one, and much more.<\/p>\n

Java is still the winner thanks to Kotlin<\/h2>\n

This survey proved that Java<\/span> and Python are the most loved programming languages<\/span> amongst developers. The love for Python is mostly due to its ease of use for machine learning<\/span> and data science calculations. It is barely being threatened by any other programming language<\/span> at the moment.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Java<\/span> has been the predominant programming language<\/span> for some time now. Even though Java<\/span> was seriously hit by JavaScript<\/span>\u2019s popularity, there was one invention that kept all Java<\/span> developers from leaving it. That is Kotlin<\/b>, Google<\/span>‘s new programming language<\/span>-specific for Android development. According to the statistics<\/span>, 92% of Kotlin developers used Java<\/span> before, but about 86% of them still continue to use Java<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Most mobile developers still use native frameworks<\/h2>\n

Two-thirds of mobile developers use native tools<\/b> to develop for mobile environments. Every other developer uses cross-platform<\/b> technologies or frameworks. Two-thirds is quite a large amount, much higher than one could expect when compared with the number of average apps developed today.<\/p>\n

Although cross-platform development became stronger thanks to JavaScript and React<\/b>, Kotlin has been able to take over and now it is being used on 66% of Android projects.<\/p>\n

The survey also indicates that the majority of Java<\/span> developers use Kotlin for new projects<\/span>: 71% use it for their profession, while 69% for their personal projects<\/span>. This suggests that Kotlin is popular for both big and small projects<\/span>. What is more relevant is that current Kotlin users have at some point migrated their existing projects<\/span> to it.<\/p>\n

React for cross-platform development<\/h2>\n

Another interesting analysis indicates that 58% of JavaScript developers use React as a framework<\/a>. As of today, this makes it the most used framework for cross-platform development by far.<\/p>\n

It is commonly known that React<\/span> was developed by Facebook<\/span> to build user interfaces<\/span>. So it is not an MVC framework by definition. The main motivation behind React<\/span>, according to their inventors, was to encourage developers to create reusable UI components which present data<\/span> that varies and changes over time. Traditional frameworks created UI interfaces using templates while React<\/span> does not, breaking user interfaces into components instead. This means React<\/span> uses a real, full-featured programming language<\/span> to render.<\/p>\n

React has reached tremendous popularity thanks to a few reasons.<\/p>\n