Survey Says C# ‘Most-Loved’ Programming Language, .NET Core Slowly Gaining Traction

Developer tooling specialist JetBrains is reporting on its new survey that delves into many aspects of software development, including programming languages, wherein it dubbed C# the “most-loved” language according to one metric.

Early this year, JetBrains — known for its “intelligent” tooling solutions including the Rider cross-platform .NET integrated development environment (IDE) — polled nearly 7,000 developers in 17 countries to identify the “State of Developer Ecosystem.”

Sections of the survey are devoted to major programming languages, including Java, C, C++, C#, Python and so on, with one “key takeaway” addressing their popularity, or love.

“The programming languages with the most love are Java and Python,” the survey report said. “Second place is a tie between C# and JavaScript. But if the results are normalized by sample size, C# is the most loved language.”

Here’s how the languages stacked up when respondents were asked to report their primary usage:

The company offered up this takeaway comparison of the leading languages:

Further investigating the C# camp, the survey indicates Microsoft’s new open source, cross-platform “Core” direction is gaining traction but still has a long way to go as it usurps the ageing, Windows-only .NET Framework, with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core leading the migration (C# questions were only shown to developers who chose C# as one of their three primary programming languages).

“Adoption of .NET Core is growing, although C# remains a Windows-first language: more than 90 percent of developers use it only on Windows,” the survey report said.

When asked what runtimes they regularly use, C# developers responded:

That 57 percentage shown for .NET Core in 2019 compares to 42 percent reported in the company’s 2018 survey and 37 percent reported in its 2017 survey, as shown by these graphics:

And, perhaps surprisingly, ASP.NET MVC still has an edge over ASP.NET Core, with the Windows-only offering actually experiencing an uptick in the number of respondents reporting using it this year as compared to last year:

This year’s report that shows 49 percent of C# respondents using ASP.NET Core compares to 37 percent in the 2018 survey, which, surprisingly, was a drop from 39 percent reported in 2017:

Other Microsoft-centric takeaways include:

More generally, outside of the .NET world, JetBrains offered up this list of facts from the report:

While more than 19,000 people participated in JetBrains’ 2019 survey, this new report only includes data based on the survey answers received from external channels, which accounts for the nearly 7,000 number of respondents mentioned above. JetBrains said it will publish more complete results — including raw data — in the future.

Developers interested in comparing 2019’s results with prior years can find the 2018 survey here and the 2017 survey here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.