Investigating trends in learning programming using YouTube tutorials

摘要

The self-directed learning industry is gathering more and more pace nowadays. One of the most common ways in this learning model is YouTube tutorials, which provide worldwide easy access to knowledge. This paper investigates tutorial trends utilising their publicly available YouTube data. The research is limited to tutorials for 11 programming languages, but can be replicated to any other field of interest. This obtained data is analysed for different categories such as tutorials spreading through years, video statistics, localisation, language facts, and tags distribution for each programming language. Aiming to understand the changing path and trends in a certain programming language over time, we introduce two new metrics for this objective - increase ratio and weighted average for each programming language. It is found that the programming language Java is the most popular over the years, followed by PHP and Python. At the end of the popularity list are Perl, Swift and Objective-C. On the other side, the most contemporary programming language is Swift, followed by Python. The most outdated is Perl, followed by Objective C and C++.