NEWS
15 Programming Languages Used By Coders on GitHub
If you are looking to change careers, learning new skills can be an advantage. In case you end up learning a skill that’s in heavy demand, it turns out to be something that brings immense benefits and stay with you lifelong. In case you’re a programmer, learning a new programming language helps you expand your career opportunities. One also needs to have the knowledge of top programming languages to make correct choices.
In today’s world, coding has become the new literacy and coding boot camps are all the rage. In case you’re a beginner, you might find our past articles on what is programming and the need to learn programming useful. In your journey of learning programming, online services and websites like Stack Overflow and GitHub will turn out to be pretty helpful.
This year, GitHub has turned 10 years old. Over the years, it has grown to become a place where developers can work together, share their code, and build products that change the world as we know it. Till date, the website has witnessed 1.5 billion commits.
As an annual exercise, GitHub has released its annual Octoverse report at GitHub Universe, which is the company’s annual user conference. The report sheds some light on some important trends like popular programming languages, most forked open source projects, most popular topics, etc.
In this article, I’ll be highlighting the programming languages that developers use the most. This list is based on the number of pull requests. It’s worth noting that GitHub is home to open source projects written in 337 unique programming languages.
15 Top Programming languages on GitHub
Note: Few of you might frown upon the fact why languages like CSS, which aren’t considered a “programming” language, are included in this list. As this list is based on GitHub’s own Octoverse report, which itself includes the languages, we have chosen to include them as well.
| No. | Programming Language |
Pull Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | JavaScript | 2.3M |
| 2. | Python | 1M |
| 3. | Java | 986K |
| 4. | Ruby | 870K |
| 5. | PHP | 559K |
| 6. | C++ | 413K |
| 7. | CSS | 335K |
| 8. | C# | 326K |
| 9. | Go | 285K |
| 10. | C | 239K |
| 11. | TypeScript | 207K |
| 12. | Shell | 206K |
| 13. | Swift | 107K |
| 14. | Scala | 99K |
| 15. | Objective-C | 66K |
From this list, it’s clear that JavaScript programming language continues to rule the web as well as GitHub. The number of JS pull requests are more than the combined requests of Python and Java, which are the #2 and #3 languages on this list.
It’s also worth pointing out that in 2017 Python has managed to replace Java to become the second-most popular language on GitHub. Compared to last year, this year it saw 40% more pull requests.
Another language worth mentioning is TypeScript, which continues to rise in 2017. Compared to last year, TypeScript saw as many as 4 times pull requests.
Some other interesting GitHub data:
- 24 million total users
- 1.5 million organizations
- 67 million total repositories
- 1 billion public commits since Sept 2016
- 25.3 million active repos since Sept 2016
- 1.3 million new pull requests since Sept 2016
