Your Python. Your Voice. Join the Python Developers Survey 2026!

PSF
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Hi folks :waving_hand:

I am posting today to share that the 2026 Python Developers Survey is now open! The PSF partners with JetBrains to run this survey to capture the current state of the Python language and its surrounding ecosystem. I think the question of timing will come up, so I want to share that we intentionally launched the survey in January (later than years prior) so that data collection and results can be completed and shared within the same calendar year.

We encourage you to contribute to our community’s knowledge by sharing your experience and perspective. Your participation is valued! The survey should only take you about 10-15 minutes to complete.

>>> Contribute to the Python Developers Survey 2026 <<<

We aim to reach even more of our community and ensure accurate global representation by highlighting our localization efforts:

  • The survey is translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German, French, and Russian.
  • To assist individuals in promoting the survey and encouraging their local communities and professional networks we have created a Promotion Kit with images and social media posts translated into a variety of languages. We hope this promotion kit empowers folks to spread the invitation to respond to the survey within their local communities.
    • We’d love it if you’d share one or more of the posts below to your social media or any community accounts you manage, as well as share the information in discords, mailing lists, or chats you participate in.
    • If you would like to help out with translations you see are missing, please request edit access to the doc and share what language you will be translating to. Translation into languages the survey may not be translated to is also welcome!
  • If you have ideas about what else we can do to get the word out and encourage a diversity of responses, please comment on this thread.

We hope that highlighting these localization efforts boosts our efforts to capture a representation of how Python is used across the ENTIRE globe!

p.s. There is also a chance to win a prize :wrapped_gift::grin:

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Any reason why pymanager isn’t an option for “What do you typically use to upgrade your Python version?”

Since it’s a first party tool, I would assume that adoption numbers are of interest.

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I assumed it was covered under “python.org”.

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There is a mandatory question about hobbies. While I find it questionable that this is asked at all in a developer’s survey, it’s honestly out of line that this question is mandatory. (“I have no hobbies” is not an appropriate option for “I don’t want to answer this question.”) Could this please be changed?

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Thanks for the feedback so far, and keep it coming! I have passed the comments along to our survey administrators to see if updates can be made at this stage.

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Yeah, I found quite a few of the questions unanswerable yet mandatory, and gave up on filling out the survey.

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I did finish the survey, but I definitely felt that it had a number of preconceived assumptions that meant I was pushed into giving answers that didn’t really reflect my views, or falling back on “no opinion” rather than answering in a way that would be misinterpreted.

And while a lot of the questions had an “Other” option, I tend to find that it’s very rarely actually helpful in capturing other views - there’s an implication that you’ll fill the text box with a short answer, like the other ones available, but often that’s not what you want. For example, given a question where over 50% of the options are AI-related, there’s no good 2-word “Other” choice that expresses the view “Why are you focusing so heavily on AI use cases, there’s a whole bunch of nuanced choices in other areas like process automation, and I would have selected 3 of those if they had been available”.

One other thing I found difficult to answer was a few questions which were framed as “Have you heard of these things”. I don’t see how that is useful. I’ve heard of a significant number of the AI services mentioned in one of the questions, for instance. But I have no interest in most of them, would never use them, and only know of many of them from news articles saying things like “here’s another over-priced AI service that the average developer can’t afford”. How is the fact that I’ve heard of these things of any use to anyone? And how will my saying that I’ve heard of them be interpreted? “Most Python programmers are up to date on developments in AI”???

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On top of what has already been said, the question about “which test framework do you use: pytest/tox/unittest” made little sense to me, as tox does not operate as the same level as pytest/unittest (tox is the runner, takes care of venv creation etc.).

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I’m still wishing for that “I can’t answer this question without being misinterpreted” option. Every year that single-choice “What python version do you use the most” question comes around and every year I have to pick at random because it doesn’t make sense. I develop libraries. They have to be compatible with a range of versions. Whilst pyenv global needs to be set to something, it’s picked on a whim and not even the same on my different machines/partitions.

It was quite depressing reading JetBrains’s blog post analysing last year’s survey results, made up of exclusive insights and action items based on questions that I and I suspect many others had to answer at random. Whilst the no-answer responses don’t do much to represent those that give them, at least they quantify how accurate or representative a given question is.

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Honestly if you develop Python itself or a key library or tool, this survey is not for you. I gave it up years ago.

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Last year[1] the following issues were raised in this thread, along with my perception of how the current survey stacks up with that past feedback.[2]

The current survey seems to be the same.

It does seem that some categories of tool were broken out into separate questions this time, generally as sub-questions if you answered yes to “do you do Task X”.

I didn’t see any such outreach happening on this forum. (The User Success WG was also mentioned but I don’t know what if anything happened on that front.)

I didn’t see any increase in such questions this year.

This question still is there, still is mandatory, and still has no clear answer for people whose Python work is not clearly classifiable in terms of “professional” status. As other comments on this thread have indicated, the same seems to be true of many other questions in the survey. Sometimes there is an “other” option but almost all the questions are mandatory for no clear reason.

As mentioned, virtually all the questions are mandatory.

I didn’t see that happen on the other thread or elsewhere on this forum.

'll echo a comment from last year:

The fact that so many of the issues discussed last year seem to have been duplicated this year, with no apparent outreach taking place in this forum, only exacerbates this problem.

@riecatnor, can you clarify what the benefit of this survey is supposed to be to the PSF and/or the larger Python community? I hate to say it but at this point I don’t really see it. There is a great opportunity here to make a survey that actually gathers input on questions that people spend a lot of time discussing, and this survey misses pretty much of all of that in favor of popularity-contest questions that smack of marketing research for JetBrains. Last year you said:

Again, I hate to say this, but at this point I feel like it might actually be better to just tell them they can do it on their own if they want to, because, at least from my perspective, attaching the PSF’s imprimatur to this suggests a level of involvement in and relevance to the Python community that isn’t borne out by what the survey actually is.

  1. or rather in 2024 — I gather there was no 2025 survey because of the change in launch date? ↩

  2. I’m quoting the people who made comments in the other thread but obviously my perception of the current study in relation to those comments is my own and the people I’m quoting might not agree with me; just want to make that clear :slight_smile: ↩

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Thanks for the continued feedback here.

As I understand it, the current intended purpose of the survey is to provide data on the use of the Python programming language by developers for the entirety of the Python ecosystem. I saw many write ups about the last survey’s results, and a few that were shared very broadly, and I’ve also seen community professionals comment that they refer to the data yearly. So, I think it is at least somewhat useful for some groups and people in the broader Python ecosystem. I think what folks are saying here is that it doesn’t feel very useful for individual/core community members as it stands (if I am misunderstanding, please let me know)- and if that’s correct, I agree that needs to be addressed.

I have flagged this with the PSF Board for their review and direction for future. Noting that because the Board is made up of a group of volunteers located across time zones (with plenty of additional and urgent matters to address), I don’t think changing the direction of this years survey is possible.

So, my follow up question to the folks/community on this thread and beyond: What data would you find useful to collect and analyze? Are there any parts of the survey results that are typically useful to you? What processes would you like to see around the implementation of a survey?

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That and the frustration at having to give answers that aren’t true because of the limitations of multiple choice. If community professionals are making decisions based on these results then they are probably ill-informed decisions.

Would it be possible to trial the survey on little groups before going live and ask them which questions they felt they couldn’t answer?

It also might help if the intention behind each question was public. If we had some idea as to why a question is being asked, we could help turn it into a more meaningful question. [1]

  1. 
 and maybe some of the marketing research for PyCharm integrations would become slightly less brazen
 ↩

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It felt more like a survey about IDEs than about how people use Python and what matters for that. I will also say that asking about my hobbies is completely irrelevant. Finally, there was a distinct lack of focus on open source contributions as a major use of Python - it seemed all about professional and not beyond.

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Well, yes. It’s a JetBrains survey. :slight_smile:

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That’s definitely an option. I considered it this year. But frankly, people make decisions based on the results of this survey, and I’m not happy at the thought of my usage not being represented in those decisions.

Call me naïve, but I’d like to do my small bit to remind people that not everyone using Python wants to go all in on AI


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Can you clarify in what way you think (or have heard) it is useful? In last year’s thread you said:

I want to push back a bit on that framing. Personally, I do not see those four articles as evidence that the survey is useful in any way. All of them seem to consist entirely of restatements of some subset of the results in a prose format. I searched the web for analyses of the survey data and found basically more of the same. The mere fact that people tell other people that the survey was done and got certain numbers doesn’t tell us much about whether any of it was meaningful.

The main issue I see is that more or less this same question was asked last year, and yet this year’s survey appears to have incorporated very little of that feedback, nor was there (to my knowledge) any public process on this forum[1]. In addition, last year you said:

This phrasing suggests that the survey is basically designed in private by JetBrains and the PSF merely “reviews” and “suggests” changes. Is that correct? Can you say explicitly what the survey design process is?

My personal view is that there is not much point in the PSF attaching its name to such a survey. What would be useful is a flip of that, in which some group of community members[2] designs the survey with public input. In other words it sounds like right now this is fundamentally a JetBrains survey to which the PSF’s name is attached; I don’t see much use to it unless it is going to be fundamentally a PSF survey that JetBrains merely administers.

  1. or anywhere else, as far as I can tell with web searches ↩

  2. e.g., members of the PSF, members of working groups, noted Python teachers or developers, people involved Python’s governance ↩

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Like Guido, I don’t participate in these surveys. They’re not looking for what people who work on Python think or do, but on what people who use Python do. And it appears to be useful to many for that purpose. Read what they said about the results of a recent survey:

I do read, and appreciate, these summaries of survey responses. They say a lot about where Python is and may be heading. Like how very many Python users are relatively inexperienced programmers, and how heavily “data science” has come to dominate applications. Although reconciling those two is a bit of a puzzle for me :wink:

No doubt some of this is driven by JetBrains’s own marketing efforts. That’s fine by me too. Python has always tried to cooperate with companies seeking to serve (& profit from) the Python programming community, and doing so is thoroughly in line with the PSF’s mission statement.

But, regardless, surveys are always annoying to fill out :wink:

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Considering this is a survey that is supposed to be useful to the Python community, I would like to have an opportunity to provide feedback on the language itself: Aspects of the language that I like/dislike and what direction I’d like to see the language go.

It would be cool if the survey gave people a chance to provide meaningful feedback on recent Python features:

How often do people use a particular recent feature? Did it become more popular throughout the years? Do people like/dislike the feature?

What about upcoming features? Are people excited for a specific thing in the next python version?

Another problem I have is that despite the survey’s focus on IDEs, I don’t even feel like I get to provide feedback on the IDEs themselves. I didn’t feel like the survey gave me a good way of communicating which exact aspects of my IDE I like/dislike.

In summary:

  • I’d like to see questions relating to the language itself.
  • I don’t mind questions about IDE’s, but the major focus should be the language itself.
  • If we have questions regarding IDEs, I’d like to see a way to provide more meaningful feedback on the IDE of my choice.
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Thank you @BrenBarn for articulating this so well. I have been complaining about the survey for many years now. I feel terrible for not being able to act on this in an effective way.

It is frustrating that almost no feedback at all was incorporated, the survey does very little for understanding the diversity of Python users, it is specially bad at surveying folks outside the conventional professional development circles and IDE users that JetBrains is focused at.

A working group and public inputs sounds essential. I believe we should also reach out for people who work with surveys for scientific research, there are people out there who know how to design and run good surveys, reduce [self-]selection bias, etc. Ideally, I wish we could have kind of a “census” of Python users, having people actively trying to find where the Python users are and what are they using it for. Paraphrasing Sumana Harihareswara on the challenge that is to reach pip users (I hope I’m not distorting it too much from the very inspiring Pycon 2024 keynote): '“Everyone drinks water, but very few think of themselves as ‘water users’ and sign up for the ‘water newsletter’”. The same goes for Python as a whole. Isn’t the PSF message “Python is for everyone”?

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