I do have to wonder how much of the downward trending of these graphs is actually due to lower interest, or simply the fact that an answer already exists and no longer needs to be asked. Upward trends are definitely indicative of growth, but downward trends...maybe just a mark of maturity and time, not necessarily declining popularity.
Interesting thought... A few more factors that might play a role:
Android documentation and tutorials have vastly improved over the past few years
Stackoverflow is heavily policed. Duplicates are usually closed. Poor questions deleted. I wonder if these are also taken into account in "Stack Overflow Trends"
Some questions don't have tags. It's rare, but a search for "android -[android]" (the word android minus the tag android) comes up with 100K results
So yeah, I guess it makes sense that we have reached something like "Q&A saturation" for Android.
I was also wondering something else along the lines... The graph's Y-axis unit is the percentage of all questions asked per month, and not an absolute amount of questions. I assume the amount of questions asked per month changes over time.
Assuming the active Stackoverflow community was also growing over the past few years, I guess we have overall more questions showing up every month compared to a few years ago where Java and Android were in its prime.
Maybe the actual amount of Java questions per month didn't go down, just the relative amount compared to all questions asked on the platform?
We do have more technologies in the mix that play a bigger role in recent years.
But on the other hand... I'm not a data scientist or analyst. I have no idea what all of that means :-D
Aging Java back-end guy. Ironically although I got my github thinking I'd fill it with nifty stuff I'd do in Java on my own time, I've ended up sticking a load of JavaScript on it instead!
@Thomas_Iguchi - I think a better metric than "Number of questions asked on StackOverflow" might be "Number of queries run on StackOverflow" - if the subject has reached or is near reaching Q&A saturation then StackOverflow becomes less of a place to ask questions on the subject & more of a place to search for questions that have already been answered. Does StackOverflow publish that kind of data, I wonder?
That's interesting... I'm not aware of recorded search queries, but I agree that should definitely complete the picture. How often do people actually search for specific questions and answers. Or a related metric: how often are Q&A's up or down-voted or commented on. Any kind of activity would give some extra insight.
I do have to wonder how much of the downward trending of these graphs is actually due to lower interest, or simply the fact that an answer already exists and no longer needs to be asked. Upward trends are definitely indicative of growth, but downward trends...maybe just a mark of maturity and time, not necessarily declining popularity.
Interesting thought... A few more factors that might play a role:
So yeah, I guess it makes sense that we have reached something like "Q&A saturation" for Android.
I was also wondering something else along the lines... The graph's Y-axis unit is the percentage of all questions asked per month, and not an absolute amount of questions. I assume the amount of questions asked per month changes over time.
Assuming the active Stackoverflow community was also growing over the past few years, I guess we have overall more questions showing up every month compared to a few years ago where Java and Android were in its prime.
Maybe the actual amount of Java questions per month didn't go down, just the relative amount compared to all questions asked on the platform?
We do have more technologies in the mix that play a bigger role in recent years.
But on the other hand... I'm not a data scientist or analyst. I have no idea what all of that means :-D
So many questions!!! Now I really want to see a data scientist here write an in-depth analysis of this stuff!
@Thomas_Iguchi - I think a better metric than "Number of questions asked on StackOverflow" might be "Number of queries run on StackOverflow" - if the subject has reached or is near reaching Q&A saturation then StackOverflow becomes less of a place to ask questions on the subject & more of a place to search for questions that have already been answered. Does StackOverflow publish that kind of data, I wonder?
That's interesting... I'm not aware of recorded search queries, but I agree that should definitely complete the picture. How often do people actually search for specific questions and answers. Or a related metric: how often are Q&A's up or down-voted or commented on. Any kind of activity would give some extra insight.
I think this might be possible by using the StackExchange API