The Top 10 Programming Languages On GitHub, Over Time

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

Comments

i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[lisabeeren]

> 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.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[tkrotchko]

I agree. If you look up what programming language experience companies are looking for, you usually end up with two very unsexy choices: Java and C.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

Javascript will continue to be popular if only because it's becoming the defacto standard for cross-platform mobile development.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[h33t l4x0r]

Any project related to jQuery or scss/sass has something to do with CSS but nothing to do with HTML.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[El_Muerte_TDS]

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

Not to forget that Google Code is closing, Codehause closed, SF.net becomes more shit every day. They housed a lot of Java projects, and they are moving to alternatives like GitHub.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[Antique Geekmeister]

> No one does C, unless he is forced by someone to do so, people usually do C++.

Or they write in C and use a C++ capable compiler, like "gcc". A lot of "C++" code being published has no elements specific to C++.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[narcc]

There's no reason their numbers should correlate to each other at all on GitHub, especially considering neither is a programming language.

This will either interest or agitate you. HTML5 + CSS3 has been proven to be Turing complete. Just to drive the point home, someone's even made the effort to produce a desktop calculator app using only those two technologies.

Re:i think it shows trends in GitHub's demographic

[Antique Geekmeister]

A great deal of professional code is published: it's key to the Apache foundation and the Free Software Foundation. And a great deal of the more straightforward being published as "C++" for lightweight applications is standards compliant C. I just went through a similar issue with a job applicant who wrote backend website processing: That person's code had _no_ C++ elements in it, written for the simplest and most reliable compilation. It was very lightweight, the libraries it required were very stable, and it had _no_ dependency confusion common to the "overloading" of C++ functions. I was quite pleased with their code.

Programming?

[lorinc]

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

Re:Programming?

[Gondola]

Next up: the TXT, NFO, INI, and CSV programming languages!

Re:Programming?

[serviscope_minor]

HTML plus CSS is Turing compete.Someone proved that by implementing rule 110. Quite astonishing, but they're you go.

http://lemire.me/blog/archives...

Javascript copies

[Meneth]

I think Javascript may have had its ranking artifically inflated due to all the libraries people copy into their own repos, like jQuery and Bootstrap.

# github projects != language popularity

[tomhath]

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.

HTML is a programming language?

[rnturn]

Us old-timers always called HTML a markup language. Just what did the author think the "ML" stood for?