What Programming Languages Do Developers Use? A Theory of Static vs Dynamic Language Choice

We know very little about why developers do what they do. Lab studies are all very well, but often their results (e.g. that static type systems make development faster) seem contradicted by practice (e.g. developers choosing JavaScript or Python rather than Java or C#). In this paper we build a first cut of a theory of why developers do what they do with a focus on the domain of static versus dynamic programming languages. We used a qualitative research method - Grounded Theory, to interview a number of developers \pmb(n=15) about their experience using static and dynamic languages, and constructed a Grounded Theory of their programming language choices.