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The Top 10 Programming Languages On GitHub, Over Time

Posted by timothy on from the diagonal-lines dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to VentureBeat's article on the information that GitHub released this week about the top-ten languages used by GitHub's users, and how they've changed over the site's history. GitHub's chart shows the change in rank for programming languages since GitHub launched in 2008 all the way to what the site's 10 million users are using for coding today. To be clear, this graph doesn't show the definitive top 10 programming languages. Because GitHub has become so popular (even causing Google Code to shut down), however, it still paints a fairly accurate picture of programming trends over recent years. Trend lines aside, here are the top 10 programming languages on GitHub today: 1. JavaScript 2. Java 3. Ruby 4. PHP 5. Python 6. CSS 7. C++ 8. C# 9. C 10. HTML

5 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic by lisabeeren · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > it still paints a fairly accurate picture of programming trends over recent years

    i don't think it does (at least not very much). i think it tells us about shifts in GitHub's demographic.

    java usage has increased at GitHub, but this more likely reflects greater adoption of GitHub by the business community.

    ruby has declined, but this probably just reflects that the ruby community really embraced GitHub at the beginning.

    1. Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic by AuMatar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And why would CSS be more than HTML? There's nobody who uses CSS without HTML, but people do use HTML without CSS. So CSS should be a subset of HTML (also neither are programming languages, but that's a separate argument). So even ignoring massive bias problems, I question their accuracy.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  2. Programming? by lorinc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it is about programming, then why are CSS and HTML along the list? These are rendering languages...

    --
    Video of some good progressive thrash music
    1. Re:Programming? by smittyoneeach · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Hey, hey, hey: everyone gets a participation trophy, mister.
      We don't want anyone feeling diminished because their specialty is not considered "programming".
      More seriously, especially with CSS, the capacity to design something that doesn't look like a mud fence is a substantial skill.
      That is: don't discount the work just because it executes subjectively in the mind of a user. You want to know where the sale is made? It sure ain't in the elegance of the design patterns buried in the server code.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  3. # github projects != language popularity by tomhath · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All this shows is a count of github projects by language. I expect that the vast majority of those projects were created by people trying to learn a language by working through tutorials. It would be more useful to display languages by number of downloads or something like that, so we could see what languages are actually being "used" rather than what languages self-taught programmer wannabes are trying to learn.