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Abstract:
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Since its founding in 2008, the question and answer website Stack Overflow has been a valuable resource for software developers, collecting more than 10 million questions on programming topics. It is also a useful source of data for observing long-term trends in the software development industry and ecosystem. The rate at which questions are asked and viewed in each topic gives insight into the growth and decline of technologies, quantifying the recent rise of web and mobile development and the expansion of the data science field. More still can be learned from the Stack Overflow Careers database, which contains the annotated CVs of hundreds of thousands of professional developers. Integrated analysis across these data sources reveals more subtle trends, including patterns underlying controversial and polarizing technologies and differences in gender imbalance among developer types. Using clustering and network analysis methods borrowed from systems biology and ecology, we explore and visualize the evolving landscape of software development and make predictions about the future of the technology industry.
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