Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow performs an annual survey to find out more about the programmer community, and the latest set of results has just been published.

Fifty-eight percent say that ethics are the responsibility of upper management, 23 percent the inventor of the unethical idea, and just 20 percent think that they're the responsibility of the developer who wrote the code.

This figure is pretty much in line with what was discovered in the Volkswagon scandal where engineers and managers were arrested but developers were not charged with writing the code.

JavaScript remains the most widely used programming language among professional developers, making that six years at the top. Other Web tech including HTML (#2 in the ranking), CSS (#3), and PHP (#9). Business-oriented languages were in wide use, with SQL at #4, Java at #5, and C# at #8. Shell scripting was at #6 (which had not shown up at all in past years), Python appeared at #7, and systems programming stalwart C++ rounded out the top 10.

Visual Basic 6, Cobol, and CoffeeScript were the top three most-dreaded languages.