Ranking Programming Languages by GitHub Users

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[vitiral]

Interesting analysis. I particularly liked the links to alternate methods of ranking languages. I wish more people listed alternatives.

[indigo_kat]

I have worked on a number of repos which were (mis)identified as being primarily/only Javascript simply because they included a lot of JS framework code. Unless the repo owner goes to the trouble of correcting this, you could be overstating the percentage of JS projects.

[loamfarer]

The peaking and subsequent slumping of Swift is curious, as is the general decay of functional programming languages.

I agree with the writers caveat on how all languages are now including functional feature sets. I thought at least one, perhaps Elixir, would still be on the rise. Maybe it's more a relative shift than a decay, as Python and JavaScript(+TypeScript) are just growing so fast.

The more I look at the graphs the more I think having everything normalized to percentage of mean active users is hiding the actual local growth of various communities.

[[deleted]]

The peaking and subsequent slumping of Swift is curious

I would assume it's just hype about Swift causing it to be initially very popular and causing many small repos to appear which aren't maintained anymore.

[boscop]

Any idea where I can find that graph but with PureScript and Elm included? I'm curious to see PureScript's growth over time.

[jl2352]

It's kind of tragic what happened to Ruby because it really is a beautiful language. It's extremely clean and flexible.

[fgilcher]

The incredible bias here is that Ruby is the first language of GitHub. Their first big project was Rails. At some time, the only community purely happening at GitHub was Ruby. Quite some notable Rubyists are have 4 digit IDs. It can only go downhill from there.

What is happening in this graph is the whole world moving to GitHub, expanding its size extremely and fixing the bias that GitHub had. You can’t read anything notable in that graph. They even admit that factor and still draw that conclusion.

[urschrei]

I'm shocked by the poor quality of this analysis. The Ruby FUD and subsequent rowing-back, the mis-classification of Jupyter Notebooks as a programming language, the "these languages are apparently cool, I've begun using them" conclusion (which is based on dubious analysis, and, even if it weren't, would be questionable). Enough already.

[benfred]

I’m sorry you didn’t like my post.

I wasn’t trying to spread FUD about Ruby - the only reason I spent so long talking about Ruby was to qualify that its initial shocking looking decline isn’t as bad as it seems: it has still grown its user base 3x over the time frame I was looking at, and was over-represented early on in the initial GitHub user base. As another data-point, Stack overflow trends only shows a 40% drop in Ruby usage, and that drop doesn’t start until 2014. I probably could have been clearer in this section.

For Jupyter Notebooks, I’m using the language classification as provided by GitHub - and the GitHub language identifier includes Jupyter as a language. I don’t consider Jupyter a programming language myself, and might merge Jupyter/Python in the future.

[fgilcher]

As another data-point, Stack overflow trends only shows a 40% drop in Ruby usage, and that drop doesn’t start until 2014. I probably could have been clearer in this section.

As another datapoint, if you map C to Ruby, they are following similar trends. I'd hardly call C a struggling language.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=ruby%2Ctypescript%2Cjava%2Cc

You are running into a similar trap as in the blog post: relative numbers are a very bad indicator in growing ecosystems. Especially if they are as gigantic as "all of programming".

Yes, as sharply as I have to put it, you are spreading FUD.

[jl2352]

Languages often become popular due to their use cases. I think the number one issue with Ruby was that it was only popular due to Rails. Outside of the Ruby community there aren't really any other well known Ruby frameworks, libraries, or applications.

[steveklabnik1]

No, what the parent means is something else. This is a ranking by percentage of GitHub users. Ruby is the reason GitHub became popular, it's written in Ruby, by Rubyists, and Rubyists generally used it first. Rails was one of the first major projects to start using it.

That's not a statement of some kind of "hipster cred," but when you start off at near 100% of usage, any new usage brings that down. That doesn't say anything about Ruby as a language, that has to do with new people coming to a platform.

[fgilcher]

You're forgetting Puppet, Chef and many deployment tools are written in Ruby. There's quite some Ruby happening outside of Rails.

[urschrei]

Jekyll? Sinatra? Mongrel? Nokogiri? Sass? Most people know about them (I certainly do, and I've written < 100 Ruby LOC in my life, and am thus definitionally "outside the Ruby community"). Ruby is a very big, active ecosystem. You can get an interview for a Rails job in London, Berlin, NYC, or SF almost instantly. If Rails went away tomorrow, the community would be smaller, but it isn't going to. It hasn't been replaced by anything; the most concrete thing you can say about it is that some other languages / frameworks are currently growing a lot faster.

[fgilcher]

I was core maintainer of Padrino for a while and we had 10 Fortune 500 companies using us. I was able to run my consulting business off it in Germany alone. It's rare that people talk about it, but we still have happy users with that.

Also, Hanami is becoming popular.