In the March I Programmer poll we asked about your preferred working environment. The clear preference was  "Working on my own project". It proves that programmers are self obsessed stay at home types - but we knew that already!

Given that we were asking about your dream job it is hardly surprising that so many of you would prefer to work on your own project - with 45% of clicks being for this option. This was over twice as popular as the runner up, which was was to work as a member of an established team.

Team work in the form of  Collaborating on open source projects took a further 17% of the votes with the remaining choices sharing 18% between them. Contract programming on site was least popular, with only 3%. This is probably a reflection of the widely held view that it might be profitable but it ain't no fun.

What is your favourite language?

Our next poll asks you to vote for your favourite mainstream programming language, with the choices based on latest top 10 languages in the TIOBE Index - which gives a ranking of languages based of their importance (see Language of the Year for a fuller discussion of TIOBE).

Originally we were going to use the top ten languages but one of them turned out to be Visual Basic - not Visual Basic .NET but the original language which is no longer current. It may be your favourite language but it didn't seem right to list it along side languages that were still actively being developed so Visual Basic was dropped and Ruby added.

It will be interesting to discover at the end of the month how well the I Programmer ranking matches the TIOBE index - so do make sure you vote and encourage your friends and colleagues to do so. If you think we have left out a language that is current and "mainstream" email the editor.

More Information:

Language of the year

TIOBE Programming Community Index for March 2011