The State of Python 2024
This is a guest post from Michael Kennedy, the founder of Talk Python and a PSF Fellow.
Hey there. I’m Michael Kennedy, the founder of Talk Python and a Python Software Foundation (PSF) Fellow. I’m thrilled that the PyCharm team invited me to share my thoughts on the state of Python in 2024. If you haven’t heard of Talk Python, it’s a podcast and course platform that has been exploring the Python space for almost 10 years now.
In this blog post, I want to bring that experience to analyze the results of the Python Developers Survey 2023 of 25,000 Python developers, run by PSF and JetBrains, alongside other key industry milestones of the past year. While the name implies it’s just 2023, votes were actually collected a few months into 2024, so this is indeed the latest PSF community survey.
You should know that, at my core, I’m a web and API developer. So we’ll be focusing in on the emerging trends for web developers in the Python space. Read on to discover the top Python trends, and I hope you can use these insights as a powerful guide for your professional programming journey in the year ahead.
Python continues its growth in popularity
Broadlying speaking, Python is in a great space at the moment. A couple of years ago, Python became the most popular language on Stack Overflow. Then, Python jumped to the number one language on the TIOBE index. Presently, Python is twice as popular as the second most popular language on the index (C++)! Most significantly, in November 2024, Github announced that Python is now the most used language on GitHub.
The folks at GitHub really put their finger on a key reason for this popularity:
[Python’s] continued growth over the past few years – alongside that of Jupyter Notebooks – may suggest that [Python developers’] activity on GitHub is going beyond traditional software development.
Indeed. It is the wide and varied usage of Python that is helping pull folks into the community. And Python’s massive library of over 500,000 open-source packages on PyPI keep them coming back.
Some key Python trends of 2024
Let’s dive into some of the most important trends. We’re going to heavily lean on the Python Developer’s Survey results.
As you explore these insights and apply them to your projects, having the right tools can make all the difference. Try PyCharm for free and stay equipped with everything you need for data science and web development.
Trend 1: Python usage with other languages drops as general adoption grows
There’s a saying in web development that you never just learn one language. For example, if you only know Python and want to get started with Flask, you still have a lot to learn. You’ll need to use HTML (via Jinja templates most likely) and you’ll need CSS. Then if you want to use a database, as most sites do, you’ll need to know some query language like SQL, and so on.
Our first trend has to do with the combination of such languages for Python developers.
Does it surprise you that Python is used with JavaScript and HTML? Of course not! But look at the year-over-year trends. We have JavaScript going from 40% to 37% and now at 35%. The trends for HTML, CSS, and SQL all follow a very similar curve.
Does that mean people are not using HTML as much? Probably not. Remember GitHub’s quote above: The massive growth of Python is partially due to twice as many non-web developers moving to Python. So HTML’s stats aren’t going down, per se. It’s just that the other areas are growing that much faster.
One other area I’d like to touch on in this section is Rust. We’ve seen the incredible success of libraries moving to Rust such as Pydantic and uv. Many of the blog posts and conference talks are abuzz with such tools. So it may feel like Rust is rushing to overtake Python. But in this survey, we see Rust barely changing YoY. Another data point is the TIOBE index I mentioned at the top. There, Rust only grew by 1.5%, whereas Python grew by 7%. We may love our new Rust tools in Python, but we love writing Python even more.
Trend 2: 41% of Python developers have under 2 years of experience
It’s easy to assume that beginners make up a relatively small portion of this developer community. But when your community is experiencing rapid growth in significant segments, that might not be true. And this is indeed what the survey suggests. A whopping 41% of Python developers have been using Python for less than 2 years.
This has a major impact on many things. If you’re writing a tutorial or documentation for an open-source project, you may be inclined to write instructions without much context such as “Next, just create a virtual environment here…” It’s also easy to assume that everyone knows what a SQL injection attack is and how to avoid it when talking to Postgres from Python.
Realizing that almost half of the people you’re talking to, or building for, are pretty much brand new to Python or have come to Python from areas outside of traditional programming roles, you can’t take for granted that they will understand such things.
Keeping this important data point in mind allows us to build an even stronger community that fosters people joining from multiple backgrounds. They’ll have a better initial experience and we’ll all be better for it.
Trend 3: Python learning expands through diverse channels
How do you stay on top of a rapidly changing technology such as Python and its broader ecosystem? We truly live in an age of riches when it comes to staying connected and getting news on specialized topics such as Python.
Respondents to the survey indicated several news channels, including YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs, and events. They shared popular and loved sources in each area. For YouTube, people frequently turn to ArjanCodes and mCoding. Listeners of podcasts recommend my own Talk Python To Me as their top resource, as well as the extremely popular Lex Fridman Podcast. While there are many high-quality Python blogs out there, people put Dan Bader’s Real Python and Michael Herman’s Test Driven sites at the top. Finally, respondents said they got massive value from the popular Python conferences such as PyCon, EuroPython, and others.
If you’re currently learning Python, one more resource I’ll toss in that you can find right here on the website at jetbrains.com/guide/python. You’ll find many quick videos teaching about many different frameworks. A bunch of them are done by my friend Paul Everitt, who is an excellent teacher.
Trend 4: The Python 2 vs. 3 divide is in the distant past
For a long time in the Python community, we had a tough transition. Python 3 was released on December 3, 2008. Yet, even in the mid 2010s, there was an ongoing debate over whether moving to Python 3 was a good idea. It was an incredibly wasteful time looking back, yet this went on for years.
In fact, Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, had to make a proclamation that there will be no more updates to Python 2 ever (beyond security patches) as a way to move people to Python 3. Here is Guido at PyCon 2014:
If you look at the Python 2 vs. 3 usage now, it’s clear this weird time for Python is in the past. Have you noticed how fast progress has been on new features and faster Python since we all moved to Python 3?
Today, it’s a bit more relevant to consider which Python 3 versions are in play for most users.
Python 3.13 came out in October 2024 after these results were concluded. So at the time of polling, 3.12 was the very latest version.
You can see that over 70% of people use one of the 3 latest releases and the majority of them are 1 release behind the latest. If you want my advice, it’s very safe to use the latest major version after a point release (e.g. 3.13.1). Talk Python and its many related websites and APIs have already been running 3.13.0 for a couple of weeks and there have been zero issues. But our apps don’t power airplanes, nuclear power stations or health-critical systems, so we can get away with a little less stability.
Trend 5: Flask, Django, and FastAPI remain top Python web frameworks
This trend is endlessly fascinating. Here’s the situation: You’re starting a new web project, and you know you’re doing it in Python. You might wonder if Django is still relevant? Do people still use Flask? After all, we’ve had some new frameworks land recently that have really gained a lot of market share. For example, FastAPI has grown very quickly as of late and its praise is well deserved.
However, the answer is yes on both accounts – people do still use Flask and they still love Django. Let’s look at the numbers.
There are three frameworks whose usage goes well beyond any others: Flask, Django, and FastAPI. They are nearly tied in usage.
Flask in particular seems to have had a big resurgence lately. I interviewed Flask’s maintainer David Lord over on Talk Python about the State of Flask and Pallets in 2024 if you’re interested in fully diving into Flask with David.
While these big three frameworks may seem nearly tied. Digging deeper reveals they are all popular but for quite different reasons and are used differently across disciplines.
Notice that 63% of web developers use Django compared to 42% using Flask. On the other hand, data scientists prefer Flask and FastAPI each over Django (36% and 31% vs 26%). Web developers use Django 2.4x as often as data scientists. Surely this is a reflection of what types of web projects data scientists typically create compared to web devs.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the Django results, check out Valeria Letusheva’s The State of Django 2024.
Trend 6: Most Python web apps run on hyperscale clouds
When considering where to host and deploy your web app or API, there are three hyperscale clouds and then a wide variety of other options. Most people indicated they chose one of the large cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP.
For every one of the large clouds, we see YoY growth and 78% of the respondents are using at least one of the large cloud providers. That is somewhat surprising. Looking below that group, we see even more interesting trends.
Number 4 is PythonAnywhere, a seriously no-fuss provider for simple hosting of Python web abbs. It allows you to set up Python web apps and other projects with very minimal Linux experience! Interesting fact: Talk Python launched on PythonAnywhere back in 2015 before moving to Digital Ocean in 2016.
Two other things jump out here. First, Heroku has long been a darling of Python developers. They saw a big drop YoY from 13% to 7%. While this might look very dramatic, it’s likely due to the fact that Heroku canceled their very popular free tier at the end of 2022. Secondly, Hetzner, a popular German hosting company that offers ridiculously affordable IaaS servers, makes the list for the first time. This is likely due to Heztner opening their first data centers in the USA last year.
Trend 7: Containers over VMs over hardware
As web apps increase in complexity and container technology continues to improve, we see most cloud developers publish their apps within containers (bare Docker, Kubernetes, and the like).
Close behind that, we see IaaS continuing to shine with many developers choosing virtual machines (VMs).
Trend 8: uv takes Python packaging by storm
This final trend I’m adding in did not make the survey, as it was released to the public after the questions were finalized, but it’s too important to omit.
Astral, the company behind Ruff, released a new package manager based on Rust that has immediately taken the Python community by storm. It’s fast – really fast:
It bundles many of the features of multiple, popular tools into one. If you’re using pip, pip-tools, venv, virtualenv, poetry, or others, you’ll want to give uv a look.
Parting thoughts
I hope you found this deep look inside the Python space insightful. These findings are interesting but they are also a powerful guide to your next year of professional programming decisions.
I encourage you to add yourself to the mailing list for the survey to get notified when the next one goes live and when the next set of results are published. Visit the survey results page and then go all the way to the bottom and enter your email address where it says “participate in future surveys.”
Finally, if you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into Python 2024, you might want to check out the video of my keynote from PyCon Philippines 2024.
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