What Do Developers Feel About Fast-Growing Programming Languages? An Exploratory Study

The developer community has witnessed an unprecedented surge in recent years, with over 100 million active developers on the GitHub platform in 2023. Along with it, there is a significant rise and adoption of new programming languages, frameworks and tools. The study aims to comprehend how developers perceive these fastgrowing programming languages by performing emotion analysis of developer’s comments posted in various software artifacts such as pull requests, issues and commits of GitHub repositories. In this regard, we employed a fine-tuned small ‘Large Language Model’ (sLLM) to detect emotions, leveraging a balanced dataset from existing literature complemented with additional manual annotations from our collected data. We have analyzed 10 fast-growing programming languages, examining 1.8 million comments from 4.1 million non-code artifacts. To further validate our findings, we have performed a qualitative survey and analysis with 28 developers. Our study reveals insights into the developers emotion associated with these fast-growing languages. Notably, “Surprise’’ is the predominant emotion associated with these languages. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering $\rightarrow$ General programming languages.