Research Article

What Java Developers have talked about? An empirical study on Stack Overflow

Number: 19 August 31, 2020
TR EN

What Java Developers have talked about? An empirical study on Stack Overflow

Abstract

Java has been a widely used programming language for a long time in various fields. Java and its libraries have been frequently updated for various reasons including bugs, change requests, performance and usability requirements and so on. In this paper, we examine how these changes affect the use of Java and analyze trends in its usage. As a data source, we use the Stack Overflow public dataset which is the largest online Q&A site about software technologies. We firstly employ a practical approach to extract the Java-related posts from the Stack Overflow dataset using cosine similarity and compare it with previous works. We then apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to the corpus for topic modelling. We divided the data set into two-year periods to obtain consistent clusters. After obtaining main topics, we examine topics and keywords on a two-year basis. Finally, unlikely previous works, we manually classify topics into two as “domain-specific” and “development environment” and investigate tendencies of these classes to change in both the short term and the long term. 

Keywords

References

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Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Engineering

Journal Section

Research Article

Publication Date

August 31, 2020

Submission Date

March 12, 2020

Acceptance Date

June 7, 2020

Published in Issue

Year 2020 Number: 19

APA
Şahin, A. S., & Güler Bayazıt, N. (2020). What Java Developers have talked about? An empirical study on Stack Overflow. Avrupa Bilim Ve Teknoloji Dergisi, 19, 354-365. https://doi.org/10.31590/ejosat.702949

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