Language Trends on GitHub
Recently we took a look at the popularity of programming languages used on GitHub.com. Below is a graph that shows the change in rank of languages since GitHub launched in…
Recently we took a look at the popularity of programming languages used on GitHub.com.
Below is a graph that shows the change in rank of languages since GitHub launched in 2008.
The rank represents languages used in public & private repositories, excluding forks, as detected by Linguist.
It should be noted that this graph represents each language’s relative popularity on GitHub. For example, Ruby on Rails has been on GitHub since 2008, which may explain Ruby’s early popularity.
Between 2008 and 2015 GitHub gained the most traction in the Java community, which changed in rank from 7th to 2nd. Possible contributing factors to this growth could be the growing popularity of Android and the increasing demand for version control platforms at businesses and enterprises.
Tags:
Written by
Related posts

Racing into 2025 with new GitHub Innovation Graph data
Discover the latest trends and insights on public software development activity on GitHub with the quarterly release of data for the Innovation Graph, updated through December 2024.

GitHub Availability Report: March 2025
In March, we experienced one incident that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

Vibe coding with GitHub Copilot: Agent mode and MCP support rolling out to all VS Code users
In celebration of MSFT’s 50th anniversary, we’re rolling out Agent Mode with MCP support to all VS Code users. We are also announcing the new GitHub Copilot Pro+ plan w/ premium requests, the general availability of models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, next edit suggestions for code completions & the Copilot code review agent.