I cloned a github repository today, and while browsing the site noticed the language stats:
Git was originally developed for the Linux kernel and is mainly for the open source community. I was interested to see JavaScript, the language of HTML 5, riding so high. PHP, C and C++ are lower than I would have guessed, Ruby and Python higher.
Here are some figures for the venerable Sourceforge:
| Java (7,163) | 19% | |
| C++ (6,449) | 17% | |
| C (4,752) | 13% | |
| PHP (3,521) | 10% | |
| Python (2,694) | 7% | |
| C# (2,481) | 7% | |
| JavaScript (2,011) | 5% | |
| Perl (1,138) | 3% | |
| Shell (757) | 2% | |
| Visual Basic NET (688) | 2% | |
| Delphi/Kylix (581) | 2% | |
This comes with a health warning. I have taken the figures from the what you get if you browse the directory and drop down Programming Languages; but the total is only about 37,000, whereas Sourceforge hosts around 324,000 projects. I am not sure what accounts for the discrepancy; it could be that language is not specified for the other projects, or they are dormant, or some other reason. But I hope the proportions indicate something of value.
Github is madly trendy, and Sourceforge ancient, so this tells us something about how open source activity has shifted towards JavaScript, Ruby and Python, and away from Java, C/C++ and C#.
Of course the overall picture of programming language usage is quite different. For example, you can get some kind of clue about commercial activity from a job board like indeed.com, which currently has 77,457 US vacancies for Java, 22,413 for JavaScript, and only 5030 for Ruby.
Nevertheless, interesting to see what languages developers on Github are choosing to work with, and perhaps an indicator of what may be most in demand on the job boards a few years from now.
Finally, looking at these figures I cannot help thinking how short-sighted Microsoft was in abandoning IronPython and IronRuby back in 2010.