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research-article

Empirical analysis of programming language adoption

Authors:

Leo A. Meyerovich,

Ariel S. RabkinAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 48, Issue 10

Pages 1 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/2544173.2509515

Published: 29 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Some programming languages become widely popular while others fail to grow beyond their niche or disappear altogether. This paper uses survey methodology to identify the factors that lead to language adoption. We analyze large datasets, including over 200,000 SourceForge projects, 590,000 projects tracked by Ohloh, and multiple surveys of 1,000-13,000 programmers.

We report several prominent findings. First, language adoption follows a power law; a small number of languages account for most language use, but the programming market supports many languages with niche user bases. Second, intrinsic features have only secondary importance in adoption. Open source libraries, existing code, and experience strongly influence developers when selecting a language for a project. Language features such as performance, reliability, and simple semantics do not. Third, developers will steadily learn and forget languages. The overall number of languages developers are familiar with is independent of age. Finally, when considering intrinsic aspects of languages, developers prioritize expressivity over correctness. They perceive static types as primarily helping with the latter, hence partly explaining the popularity of dynamic languages.

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649593
Lin RRamesh RPandhare PTay KDutta PHartmann BMehta A(2024)Design Space Exploration for Board-level Circuits: Exploring Alternatives in Component-based DesignProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642009(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642009
Gordillo ACalero CMoraga MGarcía FFernandes JAbreu RSaraiva J(2024)Programming languages ranking based on energy measurementsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4
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Index Terms

Empirical analysis of programming language adoption
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 48, Issue 10

OOPSLA '13

October 2013

867 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2544173

Editor:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages & applications
October 2013
904 pages
ISBN:9781450323741
DOI:10.1145/2509136
Co-chair:
Antony Hosking
Purdue University, USA
,
General Chair:
Patrick Eugster
Purdue University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Cristina V. Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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 the author(s) 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].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 October 2013

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 48, Issue 10

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649593
Lin RRamesh RPandhare PTay KDutta PHartmann BMehta A(2024)Design Space Exploration for Board-level Circuits: Exploring Alternatives in Component-based DesignProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642009(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642009
Gordillo ACalero CMoraga MGarcía FFernandes JAbreu RSaraiva J(2024)Programming languages ranking based on energy measurementsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4
Yang YMilanova AHirzel MLo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Complex Python features in the wildProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528467(282-293)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
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