Python vs JavaScript. The Titans Fight on Stack Overflow

The first half of 2020 demonstrates that Python is ahead of JS among the developers on Stack Overflow.

In a new data analysis, conducted by crowdsourced QA testers, GlobalAppTesting addressed the main developers’ problems like Python abandoning JS as the most inconvenient programming language on the Stack Overflow service in 2019.

RESEARCH FEATURES

The analysis was carried out for ten programming languages and SQL databases. This included JS, Python, R, Ruby, C #, C ++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, and PHP. All these programming languages were semantically analyzed by developers to identify the main problems.

JS got the leading position with over 1.75 million questions asked over the 10+ year history of Stack Overflow.

Java is the second language with 1.51 million questions, C # (1.28 million), PHP (1.26 million), and Python (1.1 million). All other languages fell short of the million marks. Nevertheless, as far as today, Python is the market leader, overtaking JS at the end of 2019.

jQuery framework was the most dubious framework, with words like Function, Duplicate, and String. Python’s last two frameworks were popular, but Django is the most interesting one.

Other language analysis brought more interesting results. For Ruby, the most popular word is Rails. More specialized languages like R or Objective-C returned data with more specific terms, including Dataframe, Datatable, and Ggplot.

ANALYSIS RESULTS

GlobalAppTesting assessed the overall study. “Each programming language has been targeted or even designed for a specific niche in the field of technology” the company noted. “R is about data science, Swift is about iOS development, and C ++ is about game development. This explains some of the differences in the problems’ types that arise …”

“Despite these obvious differences, these renderings represent some fundamental similarities in different areas,” the company added. “Basic-level data types such as strings and arrays, but not integers, floats, or booleans, seem to be often pain points that lead developers to address stack overflow.”

The developer portal has previously noted some of these trends. A Stack Overflow report, published in January 2019, noted that jQuery remained the most popular JS framework. And back in September 2018, the company highlighted the “incredible and phenomenal” growth of Python.