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15 most popular development languages, according to GitHub

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 12 Feb 2018

GitHub - the cloud-based location where open source development projects are stored, shared, tested, and collaborated - on has released a report which provides fascinating insight into the latest development trends within the global open source community.

The State of the Octoverse 2017 report contains dozens of statistics on the types of projects the GitHub community collaborated on during the previous 122 months.

According to the report, in 2017, the GitHub community reached 24 million developers from 1.5 million organisations across 200 countries, working across 67 million repositories, 25 million of which were public repositories.

Collaboration took place from virtually every corner of the world: However, there were only 486 000 accounts registered from the entire African continent - compared to 396 000 accounts from Australia with a fraction of the population. The report did not indicate the breakdown of accounts from the various African countries.

JavaScript in the lead

Interestingly, GitHub is home to open source projects written in 337 unique programming languages, the most popular of which, by far, is JavaScript: 2.3 million projects were written in Javascript during the period covered by the report, more than double second most popular, Python, which came in at 1million.

Python replaced Java as the second-most popular language on GitHub, with 40% more pull requests opened during the review period compared to the previous year. Nevertheless, Java registered 986 000 pull requests, followed by Ruby with 870 000. Thereafter, the numbers of pull requests for each language dropped significantly.

Although still relatively small, Typescript showed the largest surge in popularity with the number of pulled requests for Typescript (207 000) representing an almost 400% growth on the number of requests in 2016.

The project with the most contributors (15 000) was Microsoft/VSCode, followed by Facebook/React-Native (8 800) while Kubernetes/Kubernetes was the most discussed repository (388 100 discussions) followed by Openshift/Origin (91 100).

The report notes that comments and reviews are just a small part of how much talk it takes to build to software with feedback exchanged with co-workers, collaborators, and friends all over the world. A total of 624 000 pull requests were reviewed; 1.4 million people commented on someone else's issues; and the thumbs-up emoji was used 7.2 million times.

Used by everyone

Who used GitHub during the period covered by the report? Well, it seems the repository was used by everyone, from businesses big and small, and from small, informal teams to enterprises across the globe.

Just under half of the 100 largest companies in the United States (by revenue) used GitHub Enterprise to build software. However, one fourth of GitHub Enterprise accounts come from outside the United States, despite the fact that of the seven million developers who joined the GitHub community during the year, more than 1million developers were from the United States. Another 700 000 new GitHub users came from China. No information was provided regarding new members from Africa.

Every team on GitHub Enterprise builds software, but more than half of them code to power other industries-from finance to retail. The top industries represented are: software and Internet (22%); financial services (13%); business services (10%); manufacturing and education (7% each); and telecoms and healthcare (5% each).

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