Digging into two of Stack Overflow’s exceptional data sources: the annual Developer Survey results and stackoverflow.com’s website data, Erin Yepis reviews qualitative and quantitative sources to validate assumptions and explore the gray area between explicit and implicit behavior to answer the question “is this what we expected to see?”.

The 2022 Developer Survey collected responses from Stack Overflow users around the world to find out what programming languages and software development tools are the most popular. And because we’ve been doing this survey for 10+ years, we can see trends in growing (or declining) popularity. We can then use our website data to validate the survey sentiment by looking at what users ask about most.

In this article, we will take a look at what the recent past tells us about what developers will be loving and/or questioning in 2023.

First, I’ll look at what proxies we could use to quantify programming language popularity. Then, I’ll compare this to trends for questions posted about programming languages, using a simple regression analysis in order to elucidate and explain possible relationships between stated popularity and questions asked on Stack Overflow.

See the insightful analysis on Stack Overflow.