21 Top Programming Languages On GitHub And Stack Overflow

Short Bytes: RedMonk has just published its list of the top 21 programming languages of 2016 Q1. This list is based on the collective performance of the languages on GitHub and Stack Overflow. It has once again confirmed that JavaScript continues to run the web, followed by Java at the second position.

If you are willing to learn a new programming language and enhance your skill set, it’s very important to recognise the latest coding trends and make wise decisions. To help you out in making the correct choice, the developer research company RedMonk has just released this year’s biannual list of the top programming languages.

This list is prepared by periodically comparing the relative performance of these languages on GitHub and Stack Overflow. Using two metrics ensures that the language discussions (Stack Overflow) and usage (GitHub) is duly taken into account while preparing this list.

To be included on the list, a programming language must be observable on GitHub and Stack Overflow. These communities are used as their size is large and they get the public exposure needed for such an analysis.

This list has once again confirmed that JavaScript continues to run the web, followed by Java at the second position. “In many cases, Java and JavaScript are leveraged side-by-side in the same application, depending on its particular needs,” RedMonk writes.

If we compare it with last year’s ranking, the scenario has changed very little and the top 10 remains the same. This is because the larger a language becomes, the more difficult it becomes for others to outperform it. The ranking also shows that the change in top 10 ranking will be slow, but Go and Swift have managed to gain more points as compared to others. redmonk 21 top programming languages github stack overflow Well, here are the top 21 programming languages based on their performance on GitHub and Stack Overflow:

#1 JavaScript
#2 Java
#3 PHP
#4 Python
#5 C#
#5 C++
#5 Ruby
#8 CSS
#9 C
#10 Objective-C
#11 Shell
#12 Perl
#13 R
#14 Scala
#15 Go
#15 Haskell
#17 Swift
#18 Matlab
#19 Clojure
#19 Groovy
#19 Visual Basic

Outside the top 10, these languages got special mention due to their performance and usability:

Elixir
Julia
Rust
Swift
TypeScript

Here’s the visual depiction of the performance of the programming languages historically. You can visit RedMonk’s website to use this graph in an interactive manner: