Analyze This: Data Scientist Determines the Hottest Code for Devs

Check out this awesome interactive visualization of coding and development trends that culls data from every subject thread posted on the Stack Overflow board since its launch in 2008.

This belongs to Open Stack Exchange in-house data scientist David Robinson, who mined the freely-available StackLite dataset for the graphic. This look at StackLite is just one of dozens he assembles and publishes on VarianceExplained.org, a textbook example of an awesome programming blog.

Deep diving into the StackLite database strikes at the essence of Open Stack Exchange and StackLite. The latter is Creative Commons resource for honing analytics chops and sparking conversation. The goal is to reveal granular takeaways about how devs go about learning computer languages and popularizing their preferences among their peers. A few illustrative gems you might explore:

• Which code is most likely discussed on weekends?
• Which topics are the slowest to resolve?
• Which languages produce the most comments per thread?

Data Science indicates Data Science is hot

Let’s start with the meta info — Robinson’s visualization is a Shiny app, which is a simple framework for R, an open-source statistical language. R turns data analyses into interactive web applications without the usual CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code work that it entails.

We are seeing a lot of R in the enterprise data visualization space. RStudios, the company behind Shiny, added three industry heavy-hitters to its managerial ranks late last year. Its enterprise suite graduated from the beta version in January. It would be silly to leave R out of a discussion about hot code and trends in data science.

Always-hot JavaScript     

Not surprising to see JavaScript, an all-encompassing and clearly challenging browser scripting language, on its upward trajectory. JS cements together the foundations of web development in the modern context. Its popularity is cyclical, wherein one or two JS frameworks may be “trending” at certain points in time.

For another look into queries about code, we can use Google Trends to get a sense of which JS-related topics have the most indexed searches at any given moment.

React is used for building user interfaces, a JS framework created by Facebook. It offers a rethinking of data flow in programming; its 1-way approach reduces system-sapping reflows during the creative cycle. Rooted in functional programming and immutable data structures, React is becoming the go-to for front-end work.

Angular 2 is the follow-up to the ever-ubiquitous Google JS framework found on a good chunk of developer job openings. Angular has a reputation for complexity; other looks at Stack data put Angular among the most frequently asked-about topics in JS question threads.

ASP.NET or ASP.NOT?

The downward trajectory of the Microsoft open-source development framework is hard to miss. .NET has been around for fifteen years, many of which it was a must-have in the developer toolkit. What happened? Why the drop-off?

We can use another of Robinson’s visualizations to shed light on the withering-away of .NET on the boards. In a data pull sorting for the most polarizing technologies on Stack Exchange, .NET ranks as the most commonly ‘disliked’ framework among the top 25 tags on the site.

Does this mean that the Java fans won the epic Java vs. .Net debate that dates back years before Stack Exchange launched? Perhaps.

It might also be that .NET developers are too busy working to get their jabs in at Java. Six-figure ASP.NET developer jobs are in high demand across the U.S. according to our counts.