Analysis of Software Developers' Programming Language Preferences and Community Behavior From Big5 Personality Traits

Abstract

Many programming languages and technologies have appeared for the purpose of software development. When choosing a programming language, the developers' cognitive attributes, such as the Big5 personality traits (BPT), may play a role. The developers' personality traits can be reflected in their social media content (e.g., tweets, statuses, Q&A, reputation). In this article, we predict the developers' programming language preferences (i.e., the pattern of picking up a language) from their BPT derived from their content produced on social media. We randomly collected data from a total of 820 Twitter (currently X) and Stack Overflow (SO) users. Then, we collected user features (i.e., BPT, word embedding of tweets) from Twitter and programming preferences (i.e., programming tags, reputation, question, answer) from SO. We applied various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to predict their programming language preferences from their BPT. We also investigated other interesting insights, such as how reputation and question‐asking/replying are associated with the users' BPT. The findings suggest that developers with high openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion are inclined to mobile applications, object‐oriented programming, and web programming, respectively. Furthermore, developers with high openness and conscientiousness traits have a high reputation in the SO community. Our ML and DL techniques classify the developers' programming language preferences using their BPT with an average accuracy of 78%.