February 27, 2011 archive

Quick Way to See What Programming Languages Are Used on Github

Ever wonder what programming languages are the most popular? One way is to look at a programming community and see what is being used within that space. A large community right now in 2011 is the people using Github for git repositories (and I am one of those) and Github nicely provides a URL showing the languages in use:

https://github.com/languages

When I look at the chart at the time I’m writing this post, it looks like this:

Githublanguages

This is across 600,000+ developers and close to 1.8 million git repositories.

Given that historically many Ruby developers used git and Github, it’s not surprising to see Ruby there. With JavaScript, I have to wonder if its ranking is due to the phenomenal interest in Node.js and the heavy usage of git and Github within that community. Glad to see my old friend python hanging in there, too. The Microsoft languages like C# are missing… but then they simply may not be well represented within the Github user base.

Like any measurement this can only be taken as language popularity within the Github community. Measurement within another community would give different results. Still, the Github space is very vibrant and dynamic with lots of energy… it’s interesting to see what folks there are using.