Dobiasd / programming-language-subreddits-and-their-choice-of-words
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. (If you want you can also download the code I wrote/used as well as the raw data generated by it.)
The following chord graph (click it for an interactive version) shows how often a programming language is mentioned in communities (subreddits) not belonging to them:
(The size of a language is set by how often the others talk about it in sum. One connection represents the mutual mentions of two communities. The widths on each end is determined by the relative frequency of the mentionee being referenced by the respective other community. So PHP talks more about SQL than SQL talks about PHP.)
