Python Developer Survey: 55% Use Linux, 6% Use Python 2

More than 25,000 Python developers from nearly 200 countries took the 7th annual Python Developers Survey between November 2023 and February 2024, with 85% saying Python was their main language. Some interesting findings:Though Python 2 reached "end-of-life" status in April of 2020, last year's survey found 7% of respondents were still using Python 2. This year's survey found that number has finally dropped... to 6%. "Almost half of Python 2 holdouts are under 21 years old," the survey results point out, "and a third are students. Perhaps courses are still using Python 2?"Meanwhile, 73% are using one of the last three versions of Python (3.10, 3.11, or 3.12)"The share of developers using Linux as their development environment has decreased through the years: compared with 2021, it's dropped by 8 percentage points." [The graphic is a little confusing, showing 55% using Linux, 55% using Windows, 29% on MacOS, 2% on BSD, and 1% on "Other."]Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE (22%), followed by Jupyter Notebook (20%) and Vim (17%). The next-most popular IDEs were PyCharm Community Edition (13%), JupyterLab (12%), NotePad++ (11%) and Sublime Text (9%). Interestingly, just 23% of the 25,000 respondents said they only used one IDE, with 38% saying they used two, 21% using three, and 19% using four or more. [The annual survey is a collaboration between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains.]37% said they'd contributed to open-source projects within the last year. (77% of those contributed code, while 38% contributed documentation, 35% contributed governance/leadership/maintainer duties, and 33% contributed tests...)For "age range," nearly one-third (32%) said 21-29 (with another 8% choosing 18-20). Another 33% said 30-39, while 16% said 40-49, 7% said 50-59, and 3% chose "60 or older." 49% of respondents said they had less than two years of programming experience, with 33% saying "less than 1 year" and 16% saying "1-2 years." (34% of developers also said they practiced collaborative development.)And here's how the 25,000 developers answered the question: how long have you been programming in Python?Less than 1 year: 25%1-2 years: 16%3-5 years: 26%6-10 years: 19%11+ years: 13%So what are they doing with Python? Among those who'd said Python was their main language:Data analysis: 44%Web development: 44%Machine learning: 34%Data engineering: 28%Academic research: 26%DevOps / Systems administration / Writing automation scripts 26%Programming of web parsers / scrapers / crawlers: 25%62% were "fully employed by a company," while the next-largest category was "student" (12%) with another 5% in "working student". There were also categories for "self-employed" (6%), "freelancer" (another 6%), and "partially employed by a company" (4%). Another 4% said they were unemployed. In other news, the Python Software Foundation board has also "decided to invest more in connecting and serving the global Python community" by hosting monthly "office hours" on their Discord channel.

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