Investigate relationship between personality and programming characteristics through favourite programming language

Abstract

The variance in programming languages is growing rapidly. Therefore, it is getting harder to choose the perfect language, which could be described as preferred language to work with. This research was done to explore if those choices can be facilitated. The relationship between programming languages and personality traits has been measured. Big Five questionnaire (Ipip.ori.org, 2017) has been used to measure the personality traits, and the top six programming languages have been chosen for this research based on their popularity as per survey done in 2016 by one of most recognisable programmer’s forums (StackOverflow.com, 2017). Big Five questionnaire was used due to its usability and recognisability in other researches. The top six programming languages chosen were: JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, VisualBasic and C#. The results were analysed adopting ordinal logistic regression using statistical software (SPSS) and mean and standard deviation analysis with Microsoft Excel. Both methods are using different variations of data, therefore it was explored whether the outcomes would be similar. After data analysis was completed some correlations were noticed. However, these correlations were noticed by using SPSS software only. Correlations between three programming languages and two personality traits were discovered.