Over half of all North American developers use scripting languages according to Evans Data's newly released North American Development Survey, and that is breaking the long established pattern of using Windows as a development platform as well as a target.
While Windows dominates 3GL languages for both target and platform, far fewer developers using scripting languages are hosted on Windows and less than half of developers using PHP, Ruby or Perl are targeting the Windows Platform.
"The increasing adoption of developers using scripting languages correlates with today’s overall emphasis on web centric applications which have to be highly malleable to rapidly changing market driven requirements" said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data.
He added, "Interestingly, while we see Linux continue to increase as a target platform, this category of development reflects the greatest growth in targeting a non windows target platform"
The survey found that scripting languages are used by 56 per cent of developers today, and while more than half of those developers use scripts less than 20 per cent of the time, both the total number of developers using scripting languages and the amount of time spent is expected to increase during the coming year. Linux was strong for both target and platform with PHP and Ruby users.
Other results of this in-depth survey of over 400 professional developers in North America conducted November 2007 include:
* Fifty-four percent of developers write multi-threaded applications - key for taking advantage of multi-core processors.
* The primary perceived obstacle to multi-core development is the complexity of parallel programming, followed by a lack of available tools
* Fifty-one percent of North American developers use agile development techniques some part of the time, and that percent is expected to increase next year.
