research-article

Empirical analysis of programming language adoption

Authors:

Leo A. Meyerovich,

Ariel S. RabkinAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages & applications

Pages 1 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/2509136.2509515

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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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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cover image ACM Conferences

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

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

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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Published: 29 October 2013

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SPLASH '13: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 29 - 31, 2013

Indiana, Indianapolis, USA

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OOPSLA '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 50 of 189 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14111632
Yang HNong YZhang TLuo XCai H(2024)Learning to Detect and Localize Multilingual BugsProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36608041:FSE(2190-2213)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3660804
Crichton WKrishnamurthi S(2024)Profiling Programming Language LearningProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498128:OOPSLA1(29-54)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649812
Li WMarino AYang HMeng NLi LCai H(2024)How Are Multilingual Systems Constructed: Characterizing Language Use and Selection in Open-Source Multilingual SoftwareACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363196733:3(1-46)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2024
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