While software may not have eaten the world, the world today runs on software. Approaching 3 trillion, there have been more lines of code written then there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. According to some estimates, the search engine Google runs on 2 billion lines of code. Notably, the codebase for GPT-3 contained a mere 175 thousand lines of code; nominally more than the 145 thousand that ran the Apollo 11. Nearly 30 million software developers around the world create and maintain software across an increasingly complex array of programming languages and computing environments. First released in 1995 with the development of the web browser Netscape, Javascript has been the most popular programming language for the last 11 years according to Stack Overflow’s annual survey of software developers. Ranked 14th in overall use, Rust, released in 2010, is the most “admired” language according to the survey. Where data has primarily been organized in structured databases, more than 20% of developers now use un-structured databases like MongoDB and Redis.
Source: Stack Overflow, January 2024