Understanding Java Usability by Mining GitHub Repositories

Abstract

There is a need for better empirical methods in programming language design. This paper addresses that need by demonstrating how, by observing publicly available Java source code, we can infer usage and usability issues with the Java language. In this study, 1,746 GitHub projects were analyzed and some basic usage facts are reported. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI