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Language Trends on GitHub
- nodesocket 11y agoI'm really surprised that JavaScript is not a steeper increase, and what's up with Java? Really Java?
- igvadaimon 11y agoWell, JavaScript has already gotten the first place. It doesn't get any 'steeper' than that.
- nkozyra 11y agoSteeper meaning a larger upwards delta. Starting at #2 and going to #1 is less "steep" than, say, starting at #7 and going to #4.
- Karunamon 11y agoMentioned in the article - Android. It is the most popular mobile phone OS in the world right now.
- lqdc13 11y agoAlso probably that enterprises started migrating to Github. At the beginning it was probably early adopters platform with the languages that early adopters use.
- markokrajnc 11y agoEarly adopters also use Java.
- lexcorvus 11y agoThis is of course true in the trivial sense, but he means languages disproportionately used by early adopters (Ruby, Python, Go, etc.).
- r3bl 11y agoYup, a large number of apps + a significant number of custom ROMs. It seems like GitHub became a standard for XDA-developers.
- Thaxll 11y agoThey realized that Python / Ruby isn't that good for backend projects.
- aikah 11y ago> They realized that Python / Ruby isn't that good for backend projects. That's why both Github and Travis CI are coded in Ruby,hey ?
- Thaxll 11y agoLike many startup they go with ruby as a PoC because it's fast to implement, now when you need a really solid and performant backend you don't use ruby / python. http://www.quora.com/Why-did-twitter-move-away-from-Ruby-on-Rails http://www.quora.com/Why-did-twitter-move-away-from-Ruby-on-...
- bazzert 11y agoMinecraft modding.
- kodablah 11y agoI think this is due to many existing projects moving to GitHub. With Google Code stagnating (and now shutting down), and a lot of Apache work being done on GitHub, I imagine many of the new repositories are actually just moves.
- PascalW 11y agoI'm under the impression that with Java 8 Java is becoming much more popular again. And rightfully so IMO.
- cam- 11y agoJava is great for middleware and backend systems.
- john-waterwood 11y agoOf course Java. It's still one of the best platforms out there, especially if you weigh in performance, stability and availability of open source libraries and free or cheap hosting.
- minimaxir 11y agoEr, how is the "rank" defined? # of new repositories in that language during those years? # of total repositories in that language during those years? Or some weighted average? I really am not fond of the trend of "arbitrary rankings" a lot of startups have been using recently as content marketing to create statistical analyses that cannot be questioned. I could reverse-engineer the ranking chart using the GitHub Archive on BigQuery to check it, but I have no idea how to actually determine the statistic for ranking.
- justboxing 11y agoIt looks like a simple count of the language(s) detected by the linguist project -- https://github.com/github/linguist https://github.com/github/linguist Agreed, does not make much sense if it isn't a weighted average. A simple count could very well be littered with Hello-world repos (I've found a lot of those, in various languages) by people who are 'trying' github on.
- Gys 11y agoGood idea, maybe something like the number of code lines. That would value bigger projects higher then small projects. Which actually make sense to me. Because small projects are probably written in a specific language for a reason: batch files, css, html, examples, tests. Whereas I am interested in what language people choose for bigger projects, where several languages could used but still one has to be chosen. It would also make sense to weight in the date a project started. Newer (big) projects would then weight higher then older (big) projects. So I think taking in account the number of lines and age together is a good way to really visualize trends.
- hijiri 11y agoThe problem is that one language might require less lines of code to achieve something of the same size/complexity of another language, if it's terser.
- SiVal 11y agoThis would inflate the popularity of a language in proportion to its verbosity, but that could be approximately normalized by using line count ratios from the Great Language Shootout, which explicitly tracks how many lines various languages use to solve the same problem. Precision is pointless--the line ratios vary from problem to problem--but a rough approximation would be useful as long as you could get the statistics with and without it.
- Cshelton 11y agoI wish it showed more than the top 10. I'd like to see the rank among languages outside of the top 10. Like even Go and Rust.
- vegabook 11y agoAbsolutely. This is useful but it is highly unlikely that any of the languages in this chart will disappear anytime soon. As I plan my learning-time investment budget for the next few years, it's only marginally interesting to me that blockbuster language Number 2 goes to Number 4 or whatever. I already know that any of these languages would be a good choice as long as they fit the applicable domain. What matters much more to me is that language number 40 suddently find itself at 20, for example. To really plan for the future we need to peek at the nascent trends in small-language land. I'm much more interested in Ocaml, Julia, Nim, Rust, or Lua, even Cuda, OpenCL, Chapel or Cilk, than I am in Python, Java/script, or (sigh) CSS.
- ghaff 11y agoYou can also look at this programming language rankings post by Stephen O'Grady with RedMonk for a longer tail list. (Though I suspect potential biases in the methodology of such rankings become more pronounced the further out on the tail you get.) http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15... (Donnie used to be with RedMonk as well.)
- Lofkin 11y agoExactly!
- jk5_ 11y agoCSS is the most intriguing I think, why the sudden peak since 2013? I would have guessed that we're writing less and less CSS these days with tools like preprocessors and autoprefixers. UPDATE: I'm assuming the ranking is based on the LOC number. Might be wrong since, sadly, there is no mention on how languages are ranked...
- JuanSoto 11y agoGitHub counts preprocessors as CSS. For example, I have a project that only has .scss files but it says "2% CSS". Similarly, it says Bootstrap is built with CSS even though it uses LESS.
- mindcrime 11y agoI'd be leery of putting too much trust in those numbers, as Linguist detects the language for many repos incorrectly. I've had a number of Grails projects detected as type "javascript" or type "css" until I went in and added a .gitattributes file to help it get things straight. And I'm pretty sure not everybody bothers to do that.
- davidw 11y agoThis would be better with absolute numbers, for comparison, as well as a longer tail, so we can, say, see how Tcl is doing against Perl.
- Kenji 11y agoWow, more CSS than C,C++,C#. There is no hope for this world.
- dfcarpenter 11y agoI hope it’s a sign that more designers / front-end people are adopting good development practices! CSS is already a nightmare to maintain so using source control can only be a good thing.
- rifung 11y agoWhy is there no hope for this world? Less people using C/C++ just means less security vulnerabilities as far as I can tell. Not entirely sure why C# is listed but not Java here.
- Kenji 11y agoWhy is there no hope for this world? Because we are starting to neglect useful and important languages that shaped both our thinking and engineering. Instead, we use languages that babysit us at the expense of expressiveness and speed. Not a fan at all. Less people using C/C++ just means less security vulnerabilities as far as I can tell. Yeah, better rewrite Linux in CSS to make it secure. I heard CSS is turing-complete if you click through instructions, so it's possible! Not entirely sure why C# is listed but not Java here. Because there's more Java than CSS.
- kylnew 11y agoIf I'm reading this correctly, Objective-C is bumped out of the top 10. The line just sort of stops though, which doesn't give much indication of just how far down the list it is now.
- r3bl 11y agoYup, and there's new HTML dot, so I suppose that HTML replaced Objective-C.
- k__ 11y agoRuby: look at me, being cool! Java/JavaScript: lol, no you ain't! PHP: whatever...
- leke 11y agoPHP: I ain't going nowhere.
- hellofunk 11y agoThis puts things into perspective. As a full-time Clojure dev, this graph makes me feel part of a very niche group, for better or worse.
- swannodette 11y agoExcept you target and interop well with #1 and #2 :)
- hellofunk 11y agoIt's interesting that with such a huge and diverse, rich set of Clojure repos on Github that everyone depends on and loves, they still didn't even rank enough to be on this list. I'll admit that was a bit surprising at first, but perhaps it shouldn't have been.
- machbio 11y ago"The rank represents languages used in public & private repositories, excluding forks, as detected by Linguist." As it excludes forks, I have doubt about the data representing the actual number of repositories for the language.. as I have seen many forks doing better then their original repos..
- rhapsodyv 11y agoWould be nice to have the origin of the project... I suspect java is growing up because too much projects migrating to github.
- DAddYE 11y agoWould be nice to have these stats just for private repos. My idea (maybe wrong) is that private repos are used mostly by startups and enterprises so will be interesting to know which language is really trending in the industry.
- r3bl 11y agoI'm just a casual unemployed student developer, but I use private repositories all of the time. It just seems easier to have a couple of private repositories, work on them until they're actually useful and then make them public and share the hell out of them.
- gbachik 11y agoJavaScript > All Your time has come and gone ruby! Mwhahahahaha.
- mcosta 11y agoAll google code java projects are (auto)migrating to github. Also android.
- kenOfYugen 11y agoRelated material, number of modules and average growth/day by [http://www.modulecounts.com/ http://www.modulecounts.com/] count | avg/day JavaScript..214,741.|.379/day.[Bower + npm] Java..........114,860.|.108/day.[MAVEN] Ruby.........106,195.|..50/day.[Rubygems] Go..............86,512.|.299/day.[GoDoc] PHP.............68,276.|..99/day.[Packagist + Pear] Python.........64,865.|..56/day.[PyPI] Modulecounts offers info for more languages, I just did a TL;DR EDIT: is there a good way to present data on HN?
- anindyabd 11y agoI have a Ruby on Rails project on Github. After I added Twitter Bootstrap and the Ace text editor to my project, Github started showing that my project is 85% JavaScript. I guess it is, but I didn't write all that JavaScript! So I'm a little skeptical about JavaScript being number 1 here.
- wnevets 11y agoyou added the entire bootstrap project to your repo?
- anindyabd 11y agoI put the minified CSS and JS files under vendor/assets/. Is that not kosher?
- wnevets 11y agoAs the number of external dependency(i.e bootstrap) increases, I find using something like bower very useful. It's probably not worth it for solo projects where bootstrap is the only external dependency
- xbryanx 11y agoI wonder if they're doing any sort of de-duplication. Surely 1000s of instances of the same jquery, bootstrap, etc shouldn't count towards JavaScript's language total.
- mrcactu5 11y agoJust a bit surprised by the steady ascent of Java to #2. Are these enterprise programmers moving to open source?
- sangnoir 11y agoMore like mobile developers. Android development is mostly Java
- jiyinyiyong 11y agoCirru -- the syntax I created is beyond 200.. I think CSS and PHP are tricky. HTML file are sometimes recognized as PHP files. And CSS, it hardly a general purpose language.