Right between the first pumpkin spice beverages and gift exchanging, now is the season when we all sit down and set our strategy for the year to come.
What are your goals for 2025:
Increasing conversions from free to paid?
Driving engagement or
Boosting adoption?
No matter what you strive for, you need data to ensure all your decisions are based on concrete data. To help with that direction, in this article, we will touch the surface of 2 of the 6 State of Developer Nation 27th Edition industry reports, just made publicly available and open to all to access and download.
You can follow the links to access the full free report to dive deeper into the technology industry and use clean data to drive your 2025 successes.
Let’s explore together what is new in programming language communities and AI chatbot usage.
Developer Research Report: Sizing programming language communities
Always on time for our biannual check-in with programming language communities, we see in Q3 2024 that JavaScript reigns supreme again, with a thriving community of 27.4M developers. JavaScript’s dominance has been unchallenged for a while now, but it’s always exciting to see how these numbers evolve and what they reveal about shifts in developer interests.
The choice of programming language shapes the kinds of projects developers work on, the communities they engage with, and even the career paths they follow. A language isn’t just a tool; it’s often a gateway to specialised fields and opportunities. Python and Java continue to battle closely to be the second-largest language community, but over the last year, Python has begun to solidify a leading position. At the same time, Go and Rust are the second and third fastest-growing languages.
In this report, we estimate the global developer population using each of these languages and examine how coding experience and emerging tech trends shape language adoption across different fields.
The JavaScript community grew by 4.8M users in the last 12 months.
Here is a full breakdown of the size of programming languages communities:
Explore the full report in the SlashData Research Space to discover which types of developers are driving the growth of Go and Rust, and how the sizes of these language communities have evolved over time.
Do you need data that is more tailored to your needs? Get in touch or explore our case studies on how we helped clients answer their questions.
Developer Research Report: The rise of AI chatbots for problem-solving
Are AI chatbots the new go-to solution for problem-solving? Well, for 45% of technology professionals, hobbyists, and students, they are! From guiding users through complex troubleshooting to empowering businesses with 24/7 assistance, AI chatbots are now essential tools in our fast-paced world, reshaping problem-solving one query at a time.
45% of technology professionals, hobbyists and students use AI chatbots for problem-solving
This report explores the use of AI chatbots for problem-solving by professionals, hobbyists, and students involved in technology projects. It also looks into how much the adoption of AI chatbots changed between Q1 and Q3 of 2024 across different role types, experience levels, and geographic regions.
To understand adoption, we asked developers about the extent to which they rely on AI chatbots for different purposes - problem-solving, learning and research. While adoption rates for learning and research remained stable in the last six months, the percentage of those using AI chatbots for problem-solving increased from 40% in Q1 2024 to 45% in Q3 2024.
To learn more about how the use of AI chatbots changes based on developers’ professional status, role, years of experience in software development, and regions, you can access the full report here.
More developer insights are coming soon
As I mentioned in the introduction, this is only a first taste of the first 2 of the 6-part series. Stay tuned for 2 additional previews of the reports coming in December:
Network APIs: The New Oil In The 5G Economy
How developers build AI-enabled applications
What developers think about their teams
Comparing startups to established technology companies
You can access everything (no strings attached) in the SlashData Research Space.
The Developer Nation survey & State of Developer Nation reports
Hopefully, this is not the first time you hear of SlashData, a market research firm with a passion for clean data and actionable insights. Every quarter, SlashData runs its Developer Nation survey, a global independent survey that measures the pulse of the technology ecosystem and how software developers feel about new technologies, tools, platforms, support from developer programs and more. Our expert analysts work on identifying key trends and translate raw data into actionable insights that professionals and companies addressing a developer audience can utilise to fine-tune their strategy and address developers’ needs and wants.
The 27th edition of the Developer Nation survey reached more than 9,000 respondents from 130+ countries worldwide. The State of the Developer Nation report series highlights the key trends to look out for the beginning of 2025 and beyond.
About the author
Stathis Georgakopoulos, Product Marketing Manager
Always keen to see what’s next in the industry, Stathis is the Product Marketing Manager for SlashData, setting the table and running the marketing activities. He's our go-to guy for all things marketing and does not hide his love for content marketing and creating helpful content.