An Analysis of Python's Topics, Trends, and Technologies Through Mining Stack Overflow Discussions

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2004.06280
• Publication Date: 2020-01-01
• Authors: Tahmooresi, Hamed; Heydarnoori, Abbas; Aghamohammadi, Al...
• Keywords: Software Engineering (cs.SE); FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Software Engineering; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Python is a popular, widely used, and general-purpose programming language. In spite of its ever-growing community, researchers have not performed much analysis on Python's topics, trends, and technologies which provides insights for developers about Python community trends and main issues. In this article, we examine the main topics related to this language being discussed by developers on one of the most popular Q\&A websites, Stack Overflow, as well as temporal trends through mining 2461876 posts. To be more useful for the software engineers, we study what Python provides as the alternative to popular technologies offered by common programming languages like Java. Our results indicate that discussions about Python standard features, web programming, and scientific programming. Programming in areas such as mathematics, data science, statistics, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and so forth. are the most popular areas in the Python community. At the same time, areas related to scientific programming are steadily receiving more attention from the Python developers.