Python Overtakes Java to Become Second on GitHub

GitHub’s latest publication of its “State of the Octoverse” report has provided a jaw-dropping insight in the history of programming languages as Java and Python swap usage positions.

GitHub is still the world’s largest repository host, witnessing 10 million new users and the creation of 44 million repositories this year. Hence, making its records is a highly significant achievement for any programming language or project vendor.

According to the report, Python has for the first time in history; overtaken Java to rank second in a list of the most popular language used on GitHub.

Despite all these major shakes, Javascript still retains its place as the most-used programming language on GitHub over the years.

Worthy of note is the ranking for the fastest-growing language. Although, winners in this category are not strong enough to contest for popularity with the likes of Java, Python, PHP and other popular languages, they however possess a percentage increase in adoption that are very impressive and beat the big guys. The first three spots on this cadre go to Dart (532%), Rust (235%), and HCL (213%) while the fourth place features Kotlin, the new first-class language for Android as adopted by Google in place of Java.

While Google’s android language switch may have caused a slowdown in Java usage, the popularity of Python frameworks such as TensorFlow for machine learning and its adoption as the language of choice for teaching students, has been alleged to cause the boost in Python usage.

GitHub also reports that more people from around the world are contributing to open-source projects in the past one year than ever before. Outside the US, the top ten countries with the most open-source contributors include China, India, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, France, Russia, Brazil and Hong Kong (SAR); with China as the highest.

The global participation of these developers are more on some projects than another. The first three open-source projects that enjoys the highest number of contributors starts with Microsoft’s code editor - Visual Studio Code with 19,100 developers lending their abilities as open-source contributors; second place also goes to Microsoft Azure Docs with 14,000 contributors; the third place was claimed by Flutter  - Google’s development kit for UIs, which has 13,000 contributors.