Programmers Code for Linux and Other Client Operating Systems

Published: July 17, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The analysts and pollsters at market research firm Evans Data make their living by taking the pulse of the programming community. In its spring 2007 survey of developers in North America, Evans Data found that programmers are looking to code on non-Windows clients such as Linux and various embedded OSes in addition to creating programs that run on Windows clients.

According to the North American Development Survey, which is based on statistics gathered from over 400 developers and IT managers, 64.8 percent of developers are coding for Windows, and that statistic is down by 12 percent a year ago. Windows on the client, in terms of the programs developers are creating, has been declining for two years. Another 2 percent of developers say they will be coding for a non-Windows platform in the coming year on top of this. Linux has been a big beneficiary of this move away from Windows on the client, but not as much as you might think. A year ago, only 8.8 percent of developers in North America were saying that they were writing code for Linux on the client, and that has risen to 11.8 in the spring survey.

"If we look back over the 10-year trend we've been tracking on OS targeting," explained John Andrews, president at Evans Data, "it's clear that a shift away from Windows began about two years ago, and the data shows that this migration is now accelerating. Linux has benefited, but we also see corresponding growth in niche operating systems for non-traditional client devices. The landscape is changing."

The survey also showed that JavaScript is still the most popular scripting language in use by developers in North America, with a stunning three times as many users as PHP, Python, or Ruby. Those polled by Evans Data indicated that they expected to increase their use of Ruby by 50 percent this year. About a third of the developers polled are using virtualization hypervisors in some form on their development platforms, and 42.5 percent of those polled expect to have virtualization in use in the development cycle within the next 12 months.

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