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Programming Languages: A Usage-based Statistical Analysis and Visualization

Published: 28 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the popularity, and its trend, of programming languages can be important to anticipate which languages are best studied for future use, which are widely supported for use in enterprise projects, and investigate which skills are easiest to recruit for. In addition, popularity of languages used together can indicate tight communities of languages. This project aims to discover the current state of language popularity and use historical data to understand their respective trends. Data was sourced and processed from GitHub project language data and StackOverflow question tags be-tween 2008 and 2020. This data is then collated into visualizations with the aim of understanding popularity of languages in isolation, and in tandem. Several different visualizations were utilized, each giving different perspectives on the data. The findings were analyzed and discussed with a view to adequately identify the current trends in programming languages. From the results, it is understood that JavaScript is leading programming language in popularity in isolation. HTML and CSS are languages are commonly used in tandem with JavaScript.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICISS '21: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Science and Systems
March 2021
166 pages
ISBN:9781450389136
DOI:10.1145/3459955
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 July 2021

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Author Tags

  1. GitHub
  2. JavaScript
  3. Programming languages
  4. StackOverflow
  5. Statistics

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Streamlining Testing Operations via OES2024 35th Conference of Open Innovations Association (FRUCT)10.23919/FRUCT61870.2024.10516382(94-103)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2024
  • (2024)A Case for Feminism in Programming Language DesignProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3689492.3689809(205-222)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Analysis of Software Developers' Programming Language Preferences and Community Behavior From Big5 Personality TraitsSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.338155:3(473-490)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024

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