What is the most popular IDE, regardless of language?
What is the most popular IDE, regardless of language? That is a tough question to ask for a number of reasons. For one, there are lots of open source IDEs that may have a tremendous home-user backing, but not a good backing in the business world. Also, Eclipse is a platform, and as such it goes by many names. You add a sliver of usage here and a sliver of usage there and it starts to add up. Next, I’m not an SAP expert, so maybe there is some great IDE in that universe that can give our heavy hitters (below) a run for their money.
I like Indeed because it aggregates job postings and resumes from many sources. I think it does a better job at filtering noise than Google trends.
Anyhow, a picture tells a thousand words. Looking at the graph below you can see that Visual Studio reigns supreme. This is because of its virtual monopoly on .net language development (Yes, I tried many different combinations of IDEs in the graph below, but I remove the ones that don’t register at least a little blip). VS is the gatekeeper of .net! Eclipse itself (without Aptana, Flex Studio, IRAD, etc) amasses a huge second place victory. Looks like Zend might be an up-and-comer. With all of the PHP developers in this world, it sure seems like there should be a dominant PHP IDE.
Surprise: Low Netbeans numbers doesn’t surprise me only because I’ve seen it before. But as a frequent user I’m always amazed that this terrific product doesn’t do better.
Ok, this is really boring since there are no real competitors. When I first ran these numbers, Delphi showed up as a major player. The problem is that it is also a city, so it was skewing my statistics. So I qualified it as “Delphi and Database”, since its primarily used for database applications. Once I did that, Delphi became one of the little guys.
In summary, happy coding in whatever IDE you choose!