What programming languages ​​are popular late at night

Stack Overflow has published another collection of interesting statistics about programming languages ​​and habits of developers. This time they correlated the statistics of visits to the site by the time of day and the language tags of questions on these visits. The result was an interesting picture. It turns out that some languages ​​are more popular during working hours (for example, C # and JavaScript), while for others the proportion grows noticeably in the evening (C, Python). As if the programmers are returning home in the evening and are finally engaged in their favorite work.

It should be noted that the statistics on the time of visits was collected correctly: for each visit, the time zone was calculated by IP address and the corresponding amendment was made. It is clear that this introduces some distortions in the statistics due to the fact that some users sit behind the VPN and use anonymizers, but the distortions are not significant. The audit showed that the distortions of IP geobases did not particularly distort the overall picture.

For the analysis took one month: August 2016. This month was considered the most successful, because it has the least Western holidays, and students and schoolchildren do not influence the statistics with their homework in the evenings. Comparison of statistics for all countries and statistics for the United States only for August showed approximately the same result.
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This is how the attendance of Stack Overflow is distributed by time of day, depending on the day of the week. On these graphs programming languages ​​are not considered yet.



Nothing unexpected here. In the daytime, attendance is much higher from Monday to Friday - this is clear, because Stack Overflow is used as a working tool. Visible failure at lunchtime. On Friday evenings, attendance is the same as on Saturday evenings, but lower than on Sunday evenings.

When comparing the popularity of tags for different programming languages, only statistics from Monday to Thursday were taken into account in order to remove the anomalies of the evenings from Friday to Sunday.

The very first illustration shows how the popularity of four popular programming languages ​​C, Python, Javascript and C # is changing. There, the statistics are normalized by the percentage of visits for each programming language, so that the graphs can be correctly compared in one picture, regardless of their absolute popularity.

The author of the study, data mining specialist David Robinson, identifies several notable trends and tries to explain them.

For example, C # developers for some reason start and stop working earlier than others, and in the evenings show less activity. Perhaps this is due to the fact that C # is more often used in the financial industry and corporate software, where working schedules are more rigid.

C programmers start the day a bit later, but more often they continue to work in the evenings and end up after all. Here is the following explanation: language C is more popular with amateurs who program in their spare time (or students of summer programs who do homework). On the forums they joke that C programmers simply more often than not encounter serious problems like incomprehensible memory leaks, which they have to deal with late into the night.

Well, the Python and JavaScript developers are somewhere in the middle: they start working later than the C # developers, but earlier than the C developers, and end up later in the evening than the C # developers, but earlier than the C developers.

The following graph shows the most "extreme" tags, in which the maximum and minimum percentages of attendance occur in the time from 9:00 to 18:00. It can be considered a rating of the most professional and most amateur / favorite technologies.



During business hours, Microsoft technologies such as SQL Server, Excel, VBA, and Internet Explorer, as well as technologies like SVN and Oracle, are most commonly used.

On the other hand, in their free time, developers prefer to study web frameworks like Firebase, Meteor and Express, graphic libraries like OpenGL and Unity. The Haskell functional programming language is the only one that has achieved a certain achievement: its popularity after hours is more than 50%. That is, in his free time they are engaged more than in working hours. This is especially noticeable in the animation, which reflects the popularity of tags by time of day. We can see how Microsoft technologies are jumping up in the morning, and in the evening the mighty Haskell rises sharply above all.



It is said that "Learning Haskell" from developers is something from the category of "Write sometime a novel that I always think about." That is, it is a continuous and fascinating process that can take up all your free time.

David Robinson points out that this list largely overlaps with the past ranking of the technologies most popular on weekdays and weekends .

Moscow and Kiev also distinguished themselves by an unusual distribution of activity by time of day. Given the local time zones, the smallest percentage of those who work from 9:00 to 17:00 is here.



Maybe here the developers are a little less use Stack Overflow to get working information, as in Western countries, so the percentage of daily visits is not so high compared to the evening. In Moscow, there is generally a strange list of popularity in the afternoon.