JavaScript is the most popular language on GitHub

As other people are saying, this has a lot to do with almost all projects relying somewhat on Javascript.<p>It also has a lot to do with there being very poor ways of managing dependencies in Javascript. For instance, in python there is pip/pypi and in ruby there are gems. Javascript doesn't yet have that. I don't check in all of my dependent libs into my repo. I do check in the Javascript libs though.<p>There is npm (<a href="http://npmjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://npmjs.org/</a>) but it requires node and for most people, they don't want to bother. They just manually change the name of the file or directory and check in a new version.

Sure, but I bet it gets pulled in a lot where projects really aren't JS projects. For example, my python mongoDB library is "25% javascript" but it's all in the generated documentation: <a href="https://github.com/jeffjenkins/MongoAlchemy/graphs/languages" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jeffjenkins/MongoAlchemy/graphs/languages</a>

I viewed <a href="http://github.com/languages" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/languages</a> a couple of hours ago, and ruby was still at #1. Very cool that js is now on top of the hill!<p>(for the disbelievers: it's really not that hard to fathom, especially considering the recent growth of legitimate JavaScript runtime environments)<p>Keep rocking the boat JS! We need it

Wow, lots of hate. I guess I'll be the first to say... Nice work JavaScript. Congrats!

I would like to point out that popularity has nothing to do with software quality. I've found the &#62; popularity == &#60; library quality.<p>See Ruby: as it got more popular in the past decade, your chances of any random gem working in a production setup has approached 0.

A look at <a href="https://github.com/languages" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/languages</a> yields some interesting results. I see VimL there at #10. Is this all just people backing up their personal vim configs, or is there actually anything interesting happening in VimL (seems unlikely)?<p>Maybe a better question: is GitHub just tracking the number of repositories that contain that language to gauge its popularity? That doesn't seem like the best metric.

How much of this is skewed by every web product likely having its own copy of a large framework/library such as jQuery?

I wonder what the most popular license is. My anecdotal evidence suggests that the beer licenses have become more popular than the GPL licenses, especially for web projects (MIT, BSD etc.)