The survey results for the State of JavaScript 2024 developer survey are out. Some of the stuff in there surprised me, and a lot didn't.

Demographics

Yearly income

The United States dominates the income graph (use the "U.S.A. vs World" tab). Good god.

Hey, at least we haven't fallen for an economic system that will allow all of our work to be off-shored to the lowest bidders over the next few years, right? Right?

Job title

Use the "vs. Gender" tab, we can see the job titles with the highest percentage of women respondents are "frontend developer" and "frontend engineer". For men, it's "software architect" at 99%.

Higher education degree

Having a higher education degree is correlated with a higher salary, but from these results, it doesn't seem to matter if it's a comp sci degree.

Features

Syntax features

I'm not going to sit here and front like I even recognize the list of syntax features they chose to ask about.

This is a good reminder that the bleeding stays stays bleeding in JavaScript Land. The surface area of the language never stops growing.

Array features

The hottest new JavaScript array methods top the chart of new array features people are using. Non-mutating array methods are becoming more and more popular as people write more functional code (pure functions can't mutate state outside their scope), especially in React apps.

Browser features

10% of respondents have used the Temporal API! It's almost like we're all sick and tired of using the heaviest dependencies in the world just to format a date string.

Libraries experience and sentiment

Not surprisingly, Vite tops the sentiment chart.

Angular has the most negative sentiment, which I (naively?) assume is because people are stuck in ancient codebases if they were writing Angular code in 2024.

Frontend frameworks

React is still the frontend framework king and is used the most at work.

This is a good takeaway for folks looking to enter or re-enter the dev job market. There is a ton of existing React code that needs maintenance and tons of new React apps being written. Always be aware of the new stuff, but don't take your eyes off the prize.

Meta-frameworks

Next.js holds the meta-framework crown. This site you're reading now is a Next.js site. That is, unless some unscrupulous web scraper has stolen this content!

Other tools

Back-end frameworks

The number one backend framework is still Express, which is a testament to how easy it is learn and how useful it is in production. Nest.js is in second place, in case you think the thing missing from your JavaScript app is some OOP BDSM.

Non-JavaScript languages

Python is by far the number one language in this category, followed by PHP. I personally would have expected Rust and Go to be higher in this list. In my mind, Python is "too close to" JavaScript in terms of features to bother using it as a second language. But I guess all of the AI hype might be driving this?

AI tools

ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude are the top three AI tools being used by JS developers. Google, where the concept of the Large Language Model was invented, is a distant fourth with their own Gemini thing.

Hosting services

AWS is the top hosting service, with my personal favorite Hetzner only being added by write-in fans.