Can the choice of a programming language make you happier?
In a software developer group, discussions can get heated when the topic is operating systems, text editors or programming languages.
Thanks to the yearly survey by Stack Overflow, we can provide a data driven look at the topic. Stack Overflow have been very kind and make their data freely available in a machine-readable format.
Over 60000 developers have answered questions about their personality, job, professional and personal preferences and salary. One question was which programming language or languages they are currently using and the next one which one they would like to learn next year.
Before I dug into the data, I was interested in answering these questions:
- What is the proportion of programming languages among the survey participants?
- What are the future trends?
- Is there a relation between job satisfaction and the programming language used?
The proportion
The top of the table is largely because of the big proportion of frontend developers represented in the survey.
The trend
The developer answered which programming language they are currently using and also which one they would like to continue using next year, together with the ones they would like to learn. Thus languages can be “dropped”, which you can see as the negative numbers in the table below.
Job satisfaction
Finding a relation between the programming languages that a certain programmer is using and their job satisfaction would mean that we could create a model, that would predict your job satisfaction based only on your choice of programming languages, which would also make it easier to pick languages that can make you happy.
Unfortunately, I did not find such a model as job satisfaction is much more complex composition of coincidences. It is possible to predict job satisfaction based on a combination of answers to all the questions, but not when isolating the programming languages.
Ice hockey players get ranked by the number of goals scored and the number of passes to a goal. They also use another statistic, which is a plus point for being at the ice when your team scores a goal and a minus point when the opposite happens. In this fashion, I have created a similar ranking for the languages. I.e., when a person satisfied in their job mentioned a programming language, it has counted positively towards that language and the opposite.
It’s still pretty even. Which means one thing. You won’t be robbed of the opportunity to try them and choose the one that you like the best!
The Source
If you are interested in the source code behind the analysis, you can see it in a Jupyter notebook in this repository.
