SCC plus plus : Predicting the programming language of questions and snippets of Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is the most popular Q&A website among software developers. As a platform for knowledge sharing and acquisition, the questions posted on Stack Overflow usually contain a code snippet. Determining the programming language of a source code file has been considered in the research community; it has been shown that Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms can be effective in identifying the programming language of source code files. However, determining the programming language of a code snippet or a few lines of source code is still a challenging task. Online forums such as Stack Overflow and code repositories such as GitHub contain a large number of code snippets. In this paper, we design and evaluate Source Code Classification (SCC++), a classifier that can identify the programming language of a question posted on Stack Overflow. The classifier achieves an accuracy of 88.9% in classifying programming languages by combining features from the title, body and the code snippets of the question. We also propose a classifier that only uses the title and body of the question and has an accuracy of 78.9%. Finally, we propose a classifier of code snippets only that achieves an accuracy of 78.1%. These results show that deploying Machine Learning techniques on the combination of text and code snippets of a question provides the best performance. In addition, the classifier can distinguish between code snippets from a family of programming languages such as C. C++ and C#, and can also identify the programming language version such as C# 3.0, C# 4.0 and C# 5.0. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.