GitHub Language Trends

FWIW many projects written in web languages like PHP seem to be treated as javascript by Github because they also have javascript code (which happens to be more significant &#x2F; larger than the underlying code). It&#x27;s unfortunate that there is no way to specify the primary language of a project.<p>The Github language system is also somewhat unpredictable: <a href="https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SheetJS&#x2F;test_files</a> seems to alternate between AppleScript and Shell with each commit (even if no .scpt or .sh file was changed or added)

&gt; Violating all expectations and trends, new Java users on GitHub even grew as a percentage of overall new users, while everything else went downhill. This further supports the assertion that GitHub is reaching the enterprise.<p>This is more likely to be due to the rise of Android since 2009.

Javascript is really hard to measure I believe, the numbers are always skewed because of 3 things:<p>1. A lot of repositories include 3rd party libraries.<p>2. A lot of software includes a web interface, even if the backend language is something else, but the LOC for Javascript can be equal or even higher because of 1.<p>3. JSON is counted as Javascript sometimes

It would be much more useful to show the absolute numbers. Or provide the raw data for others to do more meaningful graphs.

I don&#x27;t know this is a good indication of trends. As the article (somewhat shallowly) shows, there are stories behind of these graphs.<p>Ruby has probably just settled to a normal position post early adopter. Shows that Ruby is still strong.<p>Javascript is probably building the sorts of libraries that other languages already have. These guys have had a lot of work to do.

This looks like commercial ecosystem (Java, JavaScript) migrating to GitHub rather than hobbyist ecosystems (Ruby, Python, Perl) being on decline.

Github should really just enable the developers to specify the language of their repo by themselves. Bitbucket get this right in the first place. Auto detection for language sounds cool, while doesn&#x27;t work for most of the web project.

Just need to have a dropdown of the primary language like Bitbucket does. Probably have different results.

GitHub is slowly starting to reflect the software world at large, although the true picture is Java and C leading by a huge, huge margin. I don&#x27;t expect GitHub to ever fully reflect that, as most Java shops, and nearly all C shops, would never host their code on GitHub.

The last 2 graphs look like they were drawn by someone who <i>hates</i> colour blind people.

Very interesting graphs, I was surprised that CSS has had a recent uptick but as somebody who has specialized in responsive layout in the past two years I guess that uptick represents my life too.<p>I can&#x27;t get enough language statistics on Github! I run &#x27;gitinspector&#x27; on my web server to compute language stats in individual git repositories, but one thing I haven&#x27;t been able to figure out it how to chart the language stats for one git repository over time in a branch.<p>Does anybody know how you can chart language use over time in one repository?

To my mind, the big trend is toward polygot programming, which perhaps reveals what a transitional and perhaps revolutionary time this is in the world of computer programming. This paragraph struck me as the most important:<p>&quot;Almost every language shows a long-term downhill trend... My initial guess is that users of languages below the top 12 are growing in share to counterbalance the decreases here. It’s also possible that GitHub may leave some users unclassified, which would tend to lower everything else’s proportion over time.&quot;

&gt;Language detection is based on lines of code

It would be interesting to see which languages are rising. In those stats, everything except Javascript seems to be declining, and the total relative decline is much larger than JS growth, so <i>something</i> must be growing - but what it is?

One of their reasons for the growth of Javascript:<p>&gt; the JavaScript development philosophy that encourages bundling of dependencies in the same repo as the primary codebase<p>I wonder how much this is still an issue with the rise of npm, bower and other package managers.

2010-2011 appears to be the &quot;year of the great inflection point&quot;

What is the cause for the correlation between Java and JavaScript?

Not sure if it&#x27;s reasonable to make this call, but it seems the dynamically typed languages have significantly higher percentage of issues overall.

I find the complete lack of Go surprising.

Presumably the big Perl spike is the migration of CPAN modules over to Github en-masse.

In my experience, GitHub&#x27;s so-called &quot;detection&quot; gets it wrong far more often than right. It&#x27;s worse than useless -- it&#x27;s misleading.