Language Popularity on GitHub

redmonk just published their latest survey of github’s most popular languages , and given github’s continuous growth in popularity, they are worth a look.

here are the results at a glance:

• javascript is seeing a consistent and serious growth.
• ruby is in sharp decline.
• python is showing a decline as well, although not as severe as ruby.
• java is showing some growth, and it’s also the only jvm language in the top 12 listed by red monk.

i’m going to go out on a limb and predict that python is being replaced by go. i don’t have a lot of information to back up this prediction except that most of the positive articles i read about go are written by python developers, and a lot of them say that they are now actively migrating their code base from python to go. i don’t see as much enthusiasm for go from developers using statically typed languages, probably because of go’s antiquated type system (which is still a big step up from python, obviously).

it’s interesting to see java continue to grow twenty years after its introduction. i think this constant growth is fueled by the language’s remarkable versatility and its ability to adapt to new technologies but also driven by a series of constant popularity boosts such as android five years ago and java 8 this year.

i’m surprised not to see groovy in this top 12 of languages, since it’s usually acknowledged as the second most popular language on the jvm and i expected its popularity grow thanks to gradle, but this doesn’t seem to be enough to crack the top 12 on red monk.

update: discussion on reddit