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What Do Developers Feel About Fast-Growing Programming Languages? An Exploratory Study

Published: 13 June 2024 Publication History
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    The developer community has witnessed an unprecedented surge in recent years, with over 100 million active developers on the GitHub platform in 2023. Along with it, there is a significant rise and adoption of new programming languages, frameworks and tools. The study aims to comprehend how developers perceive these fast-growing programming languages by performing emotion analysis of developer's comments posted in various software artifacts such as pull requests, issues and commits of GitHub repositories. In this regard, we employed a fine-tuned small 'Large Language Model' (sLLM) to detect emotions, leveraging a balanced dataset from existing literature complemented with additional manual annotations from our collected data. We have analyzed 10 fast-growing programming languages, examining 1.8 million comments from 4.1 million non-code artifacts. To further validate our findings, we have performed a qualitative survey and analysis with 28 developers. Our study reveals insights into the developers emotion associated with these fast-growing languages. Notably, "Surprise" is the predominant emotion associated with these languages.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ICPC '24: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension
      April 2024
      487 pages
      ISBN:9798400705861
      DOI:10.1145/3643916
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      Published: 13 June 2024

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      1. emotion analysis
      2. developer emotions
      3. programming languages

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