Treffer: An empirical study of the popularity of three programming languages on stack overflow: Trends, solutions, and users.

The increasing popularity of a programming language has influenced people to learn and apply it in developing software. This has caused many experts to compete in providing various kinds of guidelines, such manual books or tutorials shared on the internet. The emergence of online discussion forums, such as Stack Overflow, also adds to the list of outstanding guide resources. This has also been an advantage for people who want to learn programming languages and help increase the popularity of certain programming languages. However, the aspects that affect the popularity of the programming languages discussed on Stack Overflow has not been studied. This study aims to further investigate the factors that influence the popularity of three programming languages in an online discussion forum, Stack Overflow. The programming languages used in this study are defined based on the top 3 most popular languages in 2022 from the Tiobe Index, namely Python, C, and Java. The dataset used in the analysis is 4,028,928 questions shared on Stack Overflow that relate to these programming languages. The popularity of the 3 programming languages is analyzed based on 3 aspects, the trends, appropriate solutions, and users. The results show that Python is the most popular programming language discussed by developers in Stack Overflow based on the trends, the number of accepted answers, and users. It has been indicated by the increase of its discussion since 2008, the high solution provision compared to other languages, and a large number of users in many countries. In addition, the study findings are also beneficial for readers and future research to get insights and recommendations about the feasibility of Stack Overflow as a reading resource that relates to the 3 analyzed programming languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]