  There are possible benefits and drawbacks to chaining methods together, as is
often done in fluent APIs. A prior study investigated how Java developers chain
methods in over 2.7k open-source projects. That study observed, for the dataset
analyzed, that the use of method chaining in Java is popular and seems to be
increasing over time. That study however was limited to a smaller sample of
Java projects, and it is also not clear if the results generalize to other
languages. In this work, we first replicate the prior results by building a
similar dataset and our own analysis scripts. We then extend those results by
analyzing a much larger dataset of 89k Java projects and generalizing to other
programming languages by analyzing 26k Kotlin projects and 98k Python projects.
The results show chaining is more popular in Java and Kotlin than Python,
chaining use in Kotlin is not growing, and Python sees more use in non-testing
code.
