As a team of 5 computer scientists, we decided to focus on a computer science related research question for our project. The question we chose to research is, “Are programming languages that are easier to learn more widely represented on GitHub?”.
We interpolated programming language difficulty using developer preferences on the Stack Overflow survey. Then, we used two large datasets, the Stack Overflow developer survey and a dataset containing metadata of over a million GitHub repositories. For our analysis, we used Python + NumPy and Pandas to perform a linear regression, and Matplotlib to plot our charts for us. We found that there is a moderate positive correlation between the ease of use of a programming language and its GitHub representation, suggesting that they are not only beginner-friendly, but also ubiquitous. So just because a language is easier doesn’t mean it’s not good enough for the job!
