Programming languages subreddits and their choice of words

While reading about various programming languages, I developed a hunch about how often different languages are mentioned by other communities and about the average conversational tones used by relative members.

To examine if it was just selective perception on my site, an unconscious confirmation of stereotypes, or a valid observation I collected and analysed some data, i.e. all comments (about 333k) written to submissions (about 30k) in respective programming language subreddits from 2013-08 to 2014-07.

In this article I will present some selected results. (You can also download the raw data.)

Mutual mentions

The following chord graph shows how often a programming language is mentioned in communities (subreddits) not belonging to them:

(Click here for the interactive version and an explanation for this diagram type.)

The “big” languages are the ones most talked about, yawn.

Sure, measuring programming language popularity accurately is nearly impossible, but if we still simply take some values from TIOBE it gets interesting, because one can see how much is talked about a language relatively to how much it is supposedly used.

Here was the first time I said “Ha! I knew it!”, since Haskell then scored by far the highest.

haskell tweet

(No Haskell bash intended. I love it and its little web cousin Elm and use them for projects and also write articles about it.)

Word usage

If we now divide the number of comments in a subreddit containing a chosen word by the overall subreddit comment count (and multiply by 10000 to have a nice integer value), we get more … well, diagrams. But most results like the obsession with abstract concepts by the Haskell people and the consideration of hardware issues by people using C and C++ are not that surprising.