Who’s Used Stack Overflow Before?
The Prominence of Stack Overflow
“We serve about 100 million monthly visitors worldwide, making us one of the most popular websites in the world. I think we are in the top 50 of all websites in the world by traffic. Over the past 14 years, the site’s been accessed about 50 billion times.”
Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Exchange CEO to ZDNET
What Stack Overflow Isn’t
- not representative of all developers, all development
- in particular the user demographics* are heavily skewed:
- Male
- Western (White/European)
- Younger
- Presumably English Speaking
*see also
Opportunity: Stack Overflow Data Is Open
Stack Overflow launched late 2008: 15 years of questions and answers.
User submitted data is all licensed with a version of CC-BY-SA, and is archived for bulk download across all Stack Exchange sites.
How can we make use of this to better understand Python’s history?
Understanding Stack Overflow
For the rest of this talk I’ll be using the June 2023 dump from Stack Overflow.
Posts.xml - 58,665,485 questions and answers in 95GiB of uncompressed XML.
The earliest question tagged with Python.
Posts Over Time
Python Tag Over Time
That’s Nice, But…
there are 58 million posts!
Does This Work? Yes.
Does This Work? Yes, But…
Warmup - Q+A on Stack Overflow
Asking Questions 1
Asking Questions 2
Asking Questions 3
Fundamentals
- relatively high volume
- consistent over time
- used in lots of different ways and contexts
- (not an exhaustive list)
Fundamentals - Strings and Textual Types
Fundamentals - Files and File Systems
Fundamentals - Variables
Fundamentals - Iteration
Fundamentals - Arguments
Fundamentals - Builtin Types
Fundamentals - Dates and Times
Fundamentals - Classes
From Scientific Computing to Data Science
Pandas Pandas Pandas
Machine Learning in General
Plotting and Visualisation
Django and Web Development
Scripting
Notebooks
Summary
- Relative growth in Python questions on Stack Overflow is tied directly to data science/ML
- Language fundamentals haven’t changed…
- But there’s a lot more things built on top of Python that have!
- Python is
