15 most popular programming languages ​​according to GitHub

Software developers are in great demand now. In some companies, even trainee programmers receive a high salary. IT companies are fighting each other for talented personnel.

And the shots, in turn, are fighting for a place under the sun. The success of those and others will depend on how well they manage to keep abreast, to be in trend, to use promising technologies and programming languages. To understand what to look for and in which direction to go, software developers and their employers study various studies and popularity ratings, be it business models or the same technologies and programming languages.

However, some players in the IT market have turned out to be enterprising and have created rankings and trends projects. For example, this week GitHub published its own rating of the 15 most popular programming languages. Of course, popularity was determined by the number of pull requests for GitHub over the past year.
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Currently, GitHub features 5.8 million active users, 331 thousand organizations and 19.4 million repositories.

No. 15 - TypeScript:

Language owes its appearance to Microsoft. It was created as a web application development tool that extends JavaScript. The main developer of TypeScript is Anders Hejlsberg, who previously participated in the creation of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C #. TypeScript 2.0 will be released soon.

No. 14 - Swift:

Home cooking language is from Apple. It was created for iPhone applications in 2014. However, Swift managed to gain popularity in such a short time.

Lyft's taxi service rewrote its iPhone application in this language and reported a "huge jump" in performance.

And just recently, the new Swift Playgrounds application was released - the easiest way to get acquainted with the Swift language. At least Craig Federigi, Apple’s senior vice president of software, is sure.

No. 13 - Scala:

This programming language was published in 2001. He was picked up by such large companies as Airbnb and Apple. In their opinion, it is easier and faster to write applications for their needs than in the jaded Java language.

Initially, Scala, which supports object-oriented and functional paradigms, was created with the expectation of translation into Java and .NET byte-code. Over time, the Scala translator to JavaScript code, Scala.js, also appeared. However, in May 2016, it became known that the Scala Native project created a compiler that promises to speed up the execution of applications written in this language.

No. 12 - Objective-C:

The original C people liked so much that he had followers. In particular, some of them were inspired to create Objective-C, which appeared before the public in 1983. Of course, new ideas and elements of the Smalltalk language were added to it, but the letter C is crowned with its name.

Objective-C has especially spread among developers under the Apple platform. While he holds these positions, but Swift threatens to press off the descendant C in a short time.

No. 11 - Shell:

This is an ugly duckling among the other members of the list: Shell is not so much a language as an interpreter of commands for performing certain actions in UNIX-based operating systems. Its scripts are used, for example, to automate software updates. It contains standard constructs for loops, branching, function declarations, and so on.

No. 10 - Go:

It was developed internally by Google. The initial development of Go began in September 2007, and its direct design involved Robert Grizmer, Rob Pyke and Ken Thompson. Officially, the language was introduced in November 2009.

The Go language was developed as a system programming language for creating highly efficient programs running on modern distributed systems and multi-core processors. It can be considered as an attempt to create a replacement for the C language.

During the development, special attention was paid to ensuring highly efficient compilation. Go programs are compiled into an object code (although an interpreter is also available) and do not require a virtual machine to be executed.

No. 9 - C:

This is the language that is now trying to find a replacement. The C language was developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 at Bell Labs. It is the predecessor of such programming languages ​​as C ++, Java, C #, JavaScript and Perl. For this reason, the study of this language leads to understand and other languages. The C language is used to develop low-level applications, as it is considered closest to the hardware, second only to assembler.

No. 8 - C #:

C # belongs to the Microsoft programming language family and was developed in 2000 and became part of the first release of the .NET framework. The C # language combines the reliability of C ++ with additional Java features. Therefore, if you know Java well, you can easily switch to C # and vice versa.

The C # language allows you to develop almost any applications that are associated with the Visual Studio IDE.

No. 7 - CSS:

Cascading Style Sheets (Cascading Style Sheets) is a formal language for describing the appearance of a document written using markup language.
It is mainly used as a means of describing, shaping the appearance of web pages written using HTML and XHTML markup languages, but can also be applied to any XML documents.


Indicates the growth of the popularity of the language in percent. His place in the ranking is determined by the number of pull requests from users. The rating reflects the popularity of programming languages ​​in repositories.

No. 6 - C ++:

The C language lacked work with objects. To solve the problem, C ++ was developed in 1986, which is one of the most common languages ​​in the world. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Winamp and the Adobe product line were developed using C ++. In addition, some modern games and operating systems have been developed in C ++ due to fast processing and compilation. In addition, C ++ developers have a huge demand in the labor market.

No. 5 - PHP:

PHP is one of the most widely used languages ​​for developing dynamic web sites. PHP was developed in 1995 and is a server-side scripting language, which means that the PHP code is processed by the server, and the user receives the final result in the form of plain HTML.

PHP is an open-source development language, so thousands of modules have already been written that can be modified to the required functionality.

However, detractors are not asleep: Jeff Atwood. the founder of Stack Exchange, once wrote that PHP is not even a programming language, it is a bunch of unrelated pieces of functionality.

No. 4 - Ruby:

Ruby is a simple and readable programming language focused on web application development. Developed by Yukihiro Matsumto in 1995, the Ruby framework was used to develop Github, Scribd, Yammer, Shopify, and Groupon. Ruby combines some of the features of Lisp, Pearl and Eiffel. Ruby has a good job market and developers get it decent.

No. 3 - Python:

Python is another high-level programming language and is often considered the easiest language due to its simplicity, readability and syntax. Python was developed by Guido Van Rossum in 1991. Python has not been used as widely in the past, but has become particularly popular in recent years thanks to Google’s investment. Currently, some very well-known and reliable sites work on python, especially pinterest.com, instagram.com and rdio.com. Like PHP, Python can be used to develop web applications.

No. 2 - Java:

Java was developed by James Gosling in 1990 at Sun Microsystems. Java further enhances the capabilities of the C ++ language. A special feature of Java is that it is the first purely object-oriented programming language. Java was developed according to the WORA principle (Write Once Run Anywhere or “writing code once, you run it everywhere”). This is about Java portability. You need to compile Java source code only once, and then run it on any machine with a JVM installed (Java Virtual Machine) and then use it.

No. 1 - javascript:

Server-side scripting languages ​​are ideal for developing complex web applications, but each such task weighs heavily on the server. Therefore, the developers delegated some of the functions to the client and used JavaScript. JavaScript is a programming language that runs in a client browser and processes commands on the end-user computer, not the server, which reduces the load on the server and increases the speed of the application. JavaScript was developed by Netscape and there are hardly any sites that do not use it.


Indicates the growth of the popularity of the language in percent. His place in the ranking is determined by the number of pull requests from users. The rating reflects the popularity of programming languages ​​in repositories.

According to GitHub, JavaScript, C # and Go showed double audience growth. And the audience of Swift and TypeScript grew 3.5 times.

The TIOBE index allocated the places a little differently: Java ranked first, followed by C, C ++, C # and Python. And the leader of the GitHub ranking here takes only 6th place.