The Python Software Foundation and JetBrains conducted a Python survey to find the latest trends, usage, adoption in the Python community. There were more than 20,000 participants from over 150 countries. The Python Developers Survey 2018 was conducted for the second time in collaboration after the first one in 2017.
Language usage
From the Python survey, 84% of the developers stated that they use it as their primary language while the other 16% used it as a secondary language. This is up from the 79% of developers using Python as primary from 2017. About 50% of Python users also use JavaScript while other languages like C/C++, Java, and C# are used lesser than 2017. Bash/Shell is also being used more by Python developers.
Python uses
60% of the respondents said that they use Python for both work and personal uses. 21% exclusively for personal, educational or side projects and 19% for work. 58% of Python users use the language for data analysis which is 8% more than last year. 52% use Python for web development and 43% for DevOps/system administration. Machine learning uses also saw an uptick of 7% and stands at 38%. In general, Python is used in data analysis applications more than for Web Development.
The above numbers where multiple areas were available as choices. When there was only a single response available, web development was the most popular answer with 27%. Data analysis stood at 17% and machine learning at 11%. Interestingly, if you consider ‘data science’ data analysis and machine learning combined then most Python users are in this area totaling 28%.
Python versions in use
Python 3 is seeing larger adoption with 84% compared to 75% from 2017. Python 2 stands at 16% and will lose support from the core team next year. Major libraries are already dropping support for Python 2.
Frameworks and libraries
In web frameworks, Flask and Django were the most popular with 47% and 45%.
In data science packages, NumPy was the most used with 62%. pandas and Matplotlib stand at 51% and 46%.
To know more in-depth results of the Python survey, you can visit the JetBrains website.
Read next
pandas will drop support for Python 2 this month with pandas 0.24
Python steering council election results are out for January 2019
