The results of the 2025 Stack Overflow Survey are out and, as ever, they paint a very detailed picture of the software development landscape.

Now in its fifteenth year, this year's survey was fielded from May 29 to June 23 and attracted over 50,000 responses from 177 countries. After discarding responses that were ineligible on grounds of age and relevance 49,000 responses from 166 countries were used in the survey results. This is around half the number of respondents in Stack Overflow's largest ever survey in 2018 which attracted over 100,000 responses from 183 countries when the report was based on the responses of over 100,000.

So what do the results tell us? The short answer is "a lot". So much that we're dividing its findings into manageable chunks. There's loads about our love-hate relationship with AI - but that's for later. Today we're looking at our core concerns - programming languages, databases and IDEs, the very things we looked at when the 2018 survey came out! 

In its own commentary on the answer to the key question:

Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year?

Stack Overflow notes:

Python's adoption has accelerated significantly. It saw a 7 percentage point increase from 2024 to 2025; this speaks to its ability to be the go-to language for AI, data science, and back-end development.

Despite Python's advance, as this chart of "All Respondents" shows, JavaScript is still the language that comes top, with HTML/CSS next. SQL is in third place, putting Python in fourth. The Stack Overflow chart includes 47 languges, we've truncated the list to 15 with a cutoff at 10%: 

When the responses of those "Learning to Code", a group that is considerably younger, are singled out Python does rise to the top of the list with 71.8% having used it extensively, displacing JavaScript, with 62.8% to 3rd place. Among this group SQL drops to 5th place, used by only 45.4%. HTML/CSS is still in 2nd place and used by 5% more users. C is also more used by Learners. It appears in 4th place with 48%, just ahead of Bash/Shell used by 47%.

For Programming Languages "All Respondents" was a total of 31,771 individuals and equivalent to 64.8% of the grand total of survey respondents. For Databases the "All Respondents" total is 26,083 (53.2%) and 9 of 30 products satisfy our > 10% ctiterion:

While PostgreSQL is the clear leader for All Respondents (55.6%) and is even further ahead of the rest for Professional Developers among whom it is used by 58.2%, Learners put MySQL clearly in first place (47.7%) with SQLites in second (39.4%) just ahead of PostgreSQL (39.2%). While Microsoft SQL Server is in 4th place for Professional Developers with 30.9% it drops to 6th for Learners  place, with only 16.2% using it allowing MongoDB (28.5%) and MariaDB (20.3%) to leapfrog it. 

Stack Overflow's commentary regarding databases is: 

The significant growth in usage for Redis (+8%) highlights its growing importance. As applications become more complex, the need for high-speed, in-memory caching and data structures has made Redis an essential part of the modern tech stack.

Among Professional Developers 30.8% have used Redis extensively compared to only 12.1% of those Learning to Code.

When it comes to choice of IDE Visual Studio Code is the top choice irrespective of age and experience.

Apart from VS Code there are differences - IntelliJIDEA is the second most used IDE among the Learning to Code group (31.9%) which is presumably because of free student access to the product. PyCharm, which has an educational edition, is also more popular (21.8%). Jupyter and Android Studio are used by 22.9% and 21.9% of learners respectively. However, Cursor, the subscription-based AI powered IDE which is used by 19.3% of Professional Devs is only used by 11.3% of Learners.  

More Information

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025

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