Analyzing programming languages by community characteristics on Github and StackOverflow

Abstract: The choice of programming language is a very important decision as it not only affects the performance and maintainability of the software but also dictates the talent pool and community support available. To better understand the trade-offs involved in making such a decision, we define and compute popularity, demand, availability and community engagement of programming languages through online collaboration platforms. We perform our analysis using data from Github and StackOverflow, two of the most popular programming communities. We get data related projects, languages and developer engagement from Github and programming questions with answers along with language tags from StackOverflow. We compute metrics separately for the two data sources and then combine the metrics to provide a holistic and robust picture of the communities for the most popular programming languages.