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Tobias Hermann:
Programming language subreddits and their choice of words
Aug 21, 2014 @ 17:14:13

Tobias Hermann has put together some interesting statistics pulled from the various programming subreddits on the Reddit.com site. He measures the choice of words for each community based on how own they're used.

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 300k) written to submissions (about 40k) in respective programming language subreddits from 2013-08 to 2014-07 using PRAW and SQLite. In this article I will present some selected results.

He first covers the "mutual mentions" for each of the groups with the largest connection from the PHP subreddit being to Python. He also compares the results to the TIOBE index for each (average popularity). He gets into more details about the words used (abstract, category, pure, etc) with PHP placing somewhere roughly in the middle for most data sets. The most interesting result, however, came with the set of curse words and the frequency of their use. In the PHP Reddit community the usage of these terms is, by far, the most of any group. Unfortunately, PHP also ranks lower on the "happiness" scale.

If you're interested in seeing how he came up with these results, you can get the raw results and the code he used.

tagged: programming community language word choice subreddit

Link: https://github.com/Dobiasd/programming-language-subreddits-and-their-choice-of-words/blob/master/README.md


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