Stack Overflow Survey Respondents Still Rank WordPress Among the Most Dreadful Platforms

Stack Overflow, a Q&A community for developers, has published the results of its 2018 developer survey. The survey was held between January 8th through the 28th and includes responses from 101,592 software developers from 183 countries across the world. This is nearly twice the amount of responses compared to last year’s survey.

Last year, WordPress was the third most dreaded software platform behind Salesforce and SharePoint. This year, WordPress has improved in the rankings and is the sixth most dreaded platform. Respondents found Windows Phone, Mainframe, Salesforce, Drupal, and SharePoint to be more dreadful.

WordPress is the sixth most dreaded software platform

Despite making headway, WordPress has consistently ranked near the top in Stack Overflow’s survey for most dreadful platform. Asking developers why is probably akin to opening Pandora’s box.

JavaScript was once again the most popular technology with HTML, CSS, and SQL following closely behind. Among the various JavaScript frameworks and libraries that exist, Node.js is the most commonly used followed by Angular and React.

The survey introduced a few new topics this year, including questions about artificial intelligence and ethics. When posed with a hypothetical situation in which a developer was asked if they would write code for unethical purposes, more than half of the respondents said no. Also of note is that less than half of the respondents say they contribute to open source.

There are a lot of interesting data points in the survey. I encourage you to check out the results and let me know in the comments what sticks out to you.

Updated 3/14/2018 Corrected to say that WordPress has improved in the rankings and is therefor, less dreadful than before.