Why Python Remains the Top Choice for New Developers in 2024
The 2024 JetBrains and Python Software Foundation survey of 25,000 developers reveals Python's continued dominance, detailed demographics, tool preferences, language trends, age distribution, web and data‑science usage, cloud adoption, and security insights, highlighting why newcomers still favor Python as their first language.
JetBrains and the Python Software Foundation surveyed 25,000 Python developers, processing over 34 MB of data, and released the 2024 results.
Survey Demographics
The survey targeted real Python developers via official PSF channels (python.org, mailing lists, blog, LinkedIn, X, subreddits) from November 2023 to February 2024, covering nearly 200 countries. Only 20 % of respondents were from the United States, 9 % from India.
Gender distribution: 87 % male, 8 % female, 3 % prefer not to say, 1 % non‑binary or other.
Most Popular Tools
Top IDEs: Visual Studio Code (22 %), Jupyter Notebook (20 %), Vim (17 %), PyCharm Community (13 %), PyCharm Professional (7 %).
85 % of respondents said Python is their primary language.
25 % have published code to package repositories; 16 % build fast pre‑compiled binary modules for Python.
55 % write Python extensions in C++, 44 % in C; 36 % use memory‑safe languages such as Rust (27 %) or Go (9 %).
Other languages used include C#/.NET (7 %), Fortran (5 %), Assembly (3 %).
Trends in Language Usage
JavaScript usage with Python fell slightly from 40 % (2021) to 35 % (2023‑2024). HTML/CSS usage also declined from 38 % to 32 %.
Data‑science usage dropped from 51 % (2022) to 44 % (2024); the share of respondents identifying as data scientists fell from 34 % to 48 % engaging in data exploration.
45 % run code in containers with Kubernetes.
Age and Experience
Respondents aged 18‑29 dropped from 50 % (2020) to 40 % (2024); the 30‑39 age group rose to 33 %.
Python 2 is still used by 6 % of developers, mainly younger than 21 and students.
49 % have less than two years of programming experience; 33 % less than one year.
Employment: 62 % fully employed, 12 % students, 6 % self‑employed, 6 % freelancers, others part‑time or unemployed.
Python in Web Development and Data Science
Web frameworks are widely used: 77 % of data scientists and 97 % of web developers use them.
Flask is popular among both groups (42 % web dev, 39 % data science); FastAPI is used by 46 % of web devs and 31 % of data scientists.
Cloud Adoption
44 % have moved most production workloads to containers; another 9 % are evaluating containerization.
Adoption of major cloud platforms continues to rise.
Security Insights
Security engineer Seth Larson highlighted a specific result (details omitted).
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