Earlier this week Github published a graph showing the relative popularity of programming languages among GitHub development project repositories, both private and public, for 2008 to 2015.
Some things don’t seem too surprising. Javascript is at the top. C++ has stayed in the top 10 since 2008.
But a couple of things really surprised me. Of the three P’s, PHP and Python have remained in the top 5 for the entire period, but Perl has fallen off the chart. CSS has risen dramatically. But the most surprising thing for me was the incredible rise of Java from 7th to 2nd since 2008. Not long ago it seemed that only the big system houses like HP, IBM and Oracle were using Java. One reason for its spectacular rise may be that it is suited to building big distributed internet systems (the Hadoop framework is implemented in Java). It is also used for Android which runs more than 50% of the world’s smart phones. Something which may be related is the recent spurt in C# (Microsoft’s version of Java). In the geospatial community the rise in Java popularity has been paralleled by the rise in the popularity of GeoServer and GeoTools both of which were developed using Java.
Finally, Apple’s Swift development language for iOS, which Apple says it will open source, is off this graph, but apparently has already risen to 18th. It’s rapid rise perhaps accounts partially for the drop in Objective-C, which has like C++ stayed in the top 10 – until very recently.
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