Microsoft Windows Is Still The Top Developer Operating System

In the recent ‘State of PHP and Zend Framework Development’ survey by Zend Technologies 85% of PHP developers surveyed named Linux as their primary operating system while 11% named Windows and 2% named Mac OS X. However when asked to name their primary operating system for development, 42% named Windows versus 38.5% who chose Linux and 19.1% who chose Mac OS X.

In other survey results, close to 70% of respondents said they use Zend Studio or Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) for development, and 18% use Vim. Close to 50% of respondents reported using PHPUnit to perform unit testing.

While the survey is specific to PHP , it does suggest that Linux continues to be a preferred platform for deployment but for the actual software development, programmers tend to prefer Windows.If Windows tops the list amongst PHP – LAMP developers, there’s good reason to believe that Windows numbers would be even higher for other languages.

Also while the Mac is the hip choice for a development environment, it seems nowhere in the reckoning as a deployment platform.