Stack Overflow, the popular developer forum and online hangout, has just released the results of its 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, which is considered by many to be one of the best takes on the state of the software industry.

More than 56,000 coders from 173 different countries responded to this year’s survey, which is more than double the number of respondents from the previous edition.

The survey covers such a wide amount of topics that it’s impossible to cover them here, but the standout finding is that the vast majority of devs overwhelmingly use good ol’ Javascript as their main programming language. According to the survey results, JavaScript is the number one ranked technology used in 85.3 percent of all full-stack development, 90.5 percent of all front-end development, and 54.5 percent of all back-end development. JavaScript has consistently been ranked as the top technology since Stack Overflow published its first survey back in 2013.

It’s not much of a surprise to see that many of the hottest new technologies trending on Stack Overflow are JavaScript front-end frameworks. Number one gainer is React, the JavaScript front-end framework built at Facebook, which saw a massive 331.3 percent gain in its user base over the last year.

Also growing fast is Apache Spark, the in-memory data processing framework that’s often used alongside Hadoop. Besides garnering more users, Spark was also credited as the technology that garners the best-paid talent, with experienced Spark developers able to pull in around $125,000 a year. As for regular old JavaScript developers, they can still earn a not-insignificant $100,000 a year.

The survey also looked at developer’s working conditions, jobs and their attitudes towards them, finding that 67.8 percent of devs have a full-time job. Their biggest concerns are salaries (62.7 percent) and finding a work-life balance (50.4 percent). In addition, most devs (70.1 percent) said they wanted to “learn skills on the job”, while another 64.3 percent said they were keen to “build something new”. On the other hand, only a handful of devs (17.7 percent) said they would like to have their own office, with 24.9 percent saying they preferred the freedom of being able to telecommute.

The survey also found that very few developers work alone – some 96 percent said they were in a team of some kind.

As for devs pet hates, the majority said they hate being asked to do the impossible, with “unrealistic expectations” being cited as the biggest work challenge by 34.9 percent of respondents. Devs also complained of bad documentation (34.7 percent) and too-vague requirements (33.5 percent.

Check out more in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey here.

Image credit: Imonk72 via pixabay