An Exploratory Study on the Predominant Programming Paradigms in Python Code

TL;DR

This study classifies Python code into paradigms, revealing a predominant use of object-oriented features and their correlation with project size, based on analysis of over 100,000 open-source projects.

Contribution

It introduces an automated technique to classify Python files by paradigm and provides the first large-scale analysis of paradigm usage in Python projects.

Findings

Python developers favor object-oriented features.

Positive correlation between OO and procedural paradigms and project size.

Functional features are used despite few files being predominantly functional.

Abstract

Python is a multi-paradigm programming language that fully supports object-oriented (OO) programming. The language allows writing code in a non-procedural imperative manner, using procedures, using classes, or in a functional style. To date, no one has studied what paradigm(s), if any, are predominant in Python code and projects. In this work, we first define a technique to classify Python files into predominant paradigm(s). We then automate our approach and evaluate it against human judgements, showing over 80% agreement. We then analyze over 100k open-source Python projects, automatically classifying each source file and investigating the paradigm distributions. The results indicate Python developers tend to heavily favor OO features. We also observed a positive correlation between OO and procedural paradigms and the size of the project. And despite few files or projects being predominantly functional, we still found many functional feature uses.