Turns out Swift developers are beardy hipsters

The data engineers folks over at Trestle Technology have come up with a slightly crude tool for smashing, or indeed upholding, coder stereotypes.

Turns out Swift developers are the most likely to have ‘hipster’ facial hair, according to the EigenCoder project’s results, which combines GitHub data with Microsoft’s Project Oxford ‘Face API’ to analyze the characteristics of coders.

But to be fair, coders seem to be a pretty beardy group, looking at the graph.

The team pulled the data of the top code contributors from the 25 trending repositories on GitHub, getting between 20 and 80 useable results for 13 programming languages.

In the case of the belief that younger coders tend towards newer programming languages, the data didn’t bear that out as 21-year-old Java proved to be the most popular with the people identified as being the youngest in the crowd.

But Java devs also appeared to be the saddest too.

Don’t worry Java folks, you may not be the coolest, but you’re still useful.

Here’s the disclaimer:

It should be noted that this is super non-scientific. Who knows how accurate the Face API is or how accurately a user’s GitHub profile picture maps to any aspect of their personality/identity. It’s also unclear whether the most prolific contributors to popular repositories accurately represent a community. Also, small sample sizes.

So it’s more of a bit of fun than anything that’s ever going to get peer-reviewed, but the code is, of course, open-sourced on GitHub, minus the face mapping bit, so you can go ahead and build your own stereotype tool today.

If you want to use Microsoft’s Face API tool, you’ll have to register an Azure key.

➤ EigenCoder [Trestle Technology]