Communications of the ACM
Coders In Wealthy and Developing Countries Lean on Different Programming Languages
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Stack Overflow is the reigning king of developer forums. It's a form of default documentation for programming technologies. As a result, the site has access to all kinds of data on coding trends, emerging technologies, etc.
This week, it published an interesting observation: There exists a small but meaningful divide between the programming technologies used in wealthy countries and those used in developing countries. To be sure, programmers everywhere tend to build things with the same tools. But there are some curious exceptions.
The first is in data science, which tends to employ the programming languages Python and R.
"Python is visited about twice as often in high-income countries as in the rest of the world, and R about three times as much," data scientist David Robinson writes. "We might also notice that among the smaller tags, many of the greatest shifts are in scientific Python and R packages. This suggests that part of the income gap in these two languages may be due to their role in science and academic research."
C and C++ use is similarly skewed toward wealthy countries.
Software development likes to imagine itself as a uniquely egalitarian white-collar trade, but skillsets follow education and education follows money.
From Motherboard
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