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Most Popular Programming Languages on GitHub by OSS Insight

58 points by Tozen 3y ago

v0idzer0 3y ago
Random nitpick but Node.js is not really a programming language
mtillman 3y ago
I’m confused, this is actually a list of language repos that have the most stars, pull requests, and issues. Doesn’t seem like popular is the right word and especially for those metrics.
- LoveMortuus 3y ago
  I agree with you. On GitHub, if someone is talking about the most popular language, I would assume that means that one that people are using the most. Not the one that's used in a project that received the most starts for a given time frame. I am happy, however, to see Rust at the top. ^^ Purely just because Rust is named after fungi, which I like.
- aivisol 3y ago
  Oh that’s why C/C++ is not there.
commitpizza 3y ago
Very interesting, Vlang sounds like a cool project and kind of a dreamy language if it can become more stable. However, it doesn't speak for the most popular languages but maybe rather to the most active ones? I really doubt that Vlang (as an example) is more popular than Python, PHP etc..
- poulpy123 3y ago
  some of the languages have not been updated in years or have been archived
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Or moved to another platform like GitLab or self-hosted. Just because it isn't on GitHub, doesn't mean it has ceased being developed *somewhere*.
    - poulpy123 3y ago
      I was using the link provided by the website
- withinboredom 3y ago
  I think this is measuring '"stars" along a stability scale'. It's possible (but not proven) that stars *might* measure popularity to some degree, but PRs and issues is def a measure of stability -- more issues and PRs means it is changing a lot or has a lot of bugs or new features. This is not measuring popularity at all.
  - Tozen 3y ago
    You also have to factor in the age of the programming language as well. So the PRs and issues would have to be relative to how old the language is.
- Tozen 3y ago
  Well, such could be said about Rust, TypeScript, or Zig in relation to Python. Not just Vlang. It may point to other factors at play, such as user satisfaction or enthusiasm. Python has a large number of critics, as well as fans. As Python is a older language, its users may tend to go other places and look to GitHub less. There are many sites, not to mention Python's own, where people can download releases or get information. There are other GitHub metrics to look as well, such as contributors or forks. In both of these, Python has a huge number in comparison to other languages.
nindalf 3y ago
GitHub stars + issues + PRs is going to favour languages developed on GitHub rather than mirrored on GitHub. It also favours languages undergoing rapid development compared to those that move at a slower pace. Neither of these have anything to do with popularity, which means people actually using it. Here are some better proxies for popularity: - What people are searching for on search engines (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-07-31%202022-07-29&geo=GB&q=%2Fm%2F07sbkfb,%2Fm%2F0jgqg,%2Fm%2F01t6b,%2Fm%2F05z1_ https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-07-31%202...) - How many questions they’re asking on StackOverflow (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=java%2Cc%2B%2B%2Cc%2Cpython https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=java%2Cc%2B%2...) - Developer surveys (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...). But as long as we’re not measuring popularity based on number of results returned by Google, we’re probably fine. (https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/ https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/)
- toyg 3y ago
  Actually, searches and SO questions would correlate with languages that are harder/less intuitive, rather than necessarily popular. It's like Distrowatch with Linux, which favours "flavour of the day" distributions people are looking for, rather than the well-established ones that actually dominate deployments - because nobody needs to search for those. Developer surveys are good but they typically self-select by audience. JetBrains surveys will over-represent core JB audiences (e.g. Java developers), SO other constituencies (newbies, MS...), etc etc.
  - nindalf 3y ago
    Right, which is why I said they're proxies for popularity. We don't actually know what people are running on their computers so we use these proxies. They're not perfect, but they're a lot better than number of stars on the Github repo (TFA) or number of Google results (Tiobe). I also realise that StackOverflow has a bias towards newbies but that's not a bad thing. It just means that it's a forward looking prediction. The newbies of today are the grizzled veterans of 2030.
  - 3y ago
jasfi 3y ago
Good to see Nim doing well.
swiftcoder 3y ago
Does this dynamically load the data from the github API in frontend javascript on every page load? Le sigh. Apart from the obvious UX issue of waiting for this data to load on every page navigation, a little caching might help avoid sending a DDOS at the GitHub API...
- samhld 3y ago
  The data is stored in TiDB and queried from there. Is there a reason you assumed it was dynamically loaded in full via the Github API?
  - swiftcoder 3y ago
    Yesterday it was taking 10+ seconds to load each dataset. Occams razor suggests missing caches in such a case (since the data doesn't change with any meaningful frequency).
    - samhld 3y ago
      Interesting. I've never seen it take more than a second, or maybe two.
xupybd 3y ago
Come on F# you can do it. Seriously I wish it would gain more traction. I love using F# but fear it's a bit of a dead end of an investment.
- akkad33 3y ago
  Learning F# you learn dot net. And it's very similar to OCAML and other functional languages. The underlying principles are the same. So I'd not consider that a deadend
martinwoodward 3y ago
If anyone wants to see the most used languages on GitHub then we post that data regularly in our Octoverse report (https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages). This ranking is obtained by looking at the code pushed to GitHub and to Gists on GitHub with-in a 12 month period. What I find most interesting is how consistent that top 10 list is with the Octoverse data. We have to look much further down the table to see the cool kids like Rust, Go or Lua. While growing very fast there is just so much code out there in Javascript, Typescript, Python, Java, C#, C++ etc that is takes a lot for a language to move up the charts. That said, while I generally caution against an unhealthy interest in Stars - what the OSS Insight data does a decent job of showing is the activity and interest in the open source languages communities. Rust is clearly incredibly strong there along with things like TypeScript, Go, Python etc. But it's also heartening to see the strength in open source language ecosystems such as Swift, Java & .NET but also some surprises such as PowerShell or the more academic languages like OCAML.
esafak 3y ago
It's worth noting that this is backed by TiDB: https://ossinsight.io/explore/ https://ossinsight.io/explore/
tpoacher 3y ago
Conclusion: Github is overrun by hipsters.

58 points by Tozen 3y ago

Random nitpick but Node.js is not really a programming language

I’m confused, this is actually a list of language repos that have the most stars, pull requests, and issues. Doesn’t seem like popular is the right word and especially for those metrics.

LoveMortuus 3y ago
I agree with you. On GitHub, if someone is talking about the most popular language, I would assume that means that one that people are using the most. Not the one that's used in a project that received the most starts for a given time frame. I am happy, however, to see Rust at the top. ^^ Purely just because Rust is named after fungi, which I like.
aivisol 3y ago
Oh that’s why C/C++ is not there.

commitpizza 3y ago

Very interesting, Vlang sounds like a cool project and kind of a dreamy language if it can become more stable. However, it doesn't speak for the most popular languages but maybe rather to the most active ones? I really doubt that Vlang (as an example) is more popular than Python, PHP etc..

poulpy123 3y ago
some of the languages have not been updated in years or have been archived
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Or moved to another platform like GitLab or self-hosted. Just because it isn't on GitHub, doesn't mean it has ceased being developed *somewhere*.
  - poulpy123 3y ago
    I was using the link provided by the website
withinboredom 3y ago
I think this is measuring '"stars" along a stability scale'. It's possible (but not proven) that stars *might* measure popularity to some degree, but PRs and issues is def a measure of stability -- more issues and PRs means it is changing a lot or has a lot of bugs or new features. This is not measuring popularity at all.
- Tozen 3y ago
  You also have to factor in the age of the programming language as well. So the PRs and issues would have to be relative to how old the language is.
Tozen 3y ago
Well, such could be said about Rust, TypeScript, or Zig in relation to Python. Not just Vlang. It may point to other factors at play, such as user satisfaction or enthusiasm. Python has a large number of critics, as well as fans. As Python is a older language, its users may tend to go other places and look to GitHub less. There are many sites, not to mention Python's own, where people can download releases or get information. There are other GitHub metrics to look as well, such as contributors or forks. In both of these, Python has a huge number in comparison to other languages.

nindalf 3y ago

GitHub stars + issues + PRs is going to favour languages developed on GitHub rather than mirrored on GitHub. It also favours languages undergoing rapid development compared to those that move at a slower pace. Neither of these have anything to do with popularity, which means people actually using it. Here are some better proxies for popularity: - What people are searching for on search engines (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-07-31%202022-07-29&geo=GB&q=%2Fm%2F07sbkfb,%2Fm%2F0jgqg,%2Fm%2F01t6b,%2Fm%2F05z1_ https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-07-31%202...) - How many questions they’re asking on StackOverflow (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=java%2Cc%2B%2B%2Cc%2Cpython https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=java%2Cc%2B%2...) - Developer surveys (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...). But as long as we’re not measuring popularity based on number of results returned by Google, we’re probably fine. (https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/ https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/)

toyg 3y ago
Actually, searches and SO questions would correlate with languages that are harder/less intuitive, rather than necessarily popular. It's like Distrowatch with Linux, which favours "flavour of the day" distributions people are looking for, rather than the well-established ones that actually dominate deployments - because nobody needs to search for those. Developer surveys are good but they typically self-select by audience. JetBrains surveys will over-represent core JB audiences (e.g. Java developers), SO other constituencies (newbies, MS...), etc etc.
- nindalf 3y ago
  Right, which is why I said they're proxies for popularity. We don't actually know what people are running on their computers so we use these proxies. They're not perfect, but they're a lot better than number of stars on the Github repo (TFA) or number of Google results (Tiobe). I also realise that StackOverflow has a bias towards newbies but that's not a bad thing. It just means that it's a forward looking prediction. The newbies of today are the grizzled veterans of 2030.
- 3y ago

jasfi 3y ago

Good to see Nim doing well.

swiftcoder 3y ago

Does this dynamically load the data from the github API in frontend javascript on every page load? Le sigh. Apart from the obvious UX issue of waiting for this data to load on every page navigation, a little caching might help avoid sending a DDOS at the GitHub API...

samhld 3y ago
The data is stored in TiDB and queried from there. Is there a reason you assumed it was dynamically loaded in full via the Github API?
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  Yesterday it was taking 10+ seconds to load each dataset. Occams razor suggests missing caches in such a case (since the data doesn't change with any meaningful frequency).
  - samhld 3y ago
    Interesting. I've never seen it take more than a second, or maybe two.

xupybd 3y ago

Come on F# you can do it. Seriously I wish it would gain more traction. I love using F# but fear it's a bit of a dead end of an investment.

akkad33 3y ago
Learning F# you learn dot net. And it's very similar to OCAML and other functional languages. The underlying principles are the same. So I'd not consider that a deadend

martinwoodward 3y ago

If anyone wants to see the most used languages on GitHub then we post that data regularly in our Octoverse report (https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages). This ranking is obtained by looking at the code pushed to GitHub and to Gists on GitHub with-in a 12 month period. What I find most interesting is how consistent that top 10 list is with the Octoverse data. We have to look much further down the table to see the cool kids like Rust, Go or Lua. While growing very fast there is just so much code out there in Javascript, Typescript, Python, Java, C#, C++ etc that is takes a lot for a language to move up the charts. That said, while I generally caution against an unhealthy interest in Stars - what the OSS Insight data does a decent job of showing is the activity and interest in the open source languages communities. Rust is clearly incredibly strong there along with things like TypeScript, Go, Python etc. But it's also heartening to see the strength in open source language ecosystems such as Swift, Java & .NET but also some surprises such as PowerShell or the more academic languages like OCAML.

esafak 3y ago

It's worth noting that this is backed by TiDB: https://ossinsight.io/explore/ https://ossinsight.io/explore/

tpoacher 3y ago

Conclusion: Github is overrun by hipsters.