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Programming Stats Java Microsoft Open Source Python

Python Beats Java Again in New GitHub Annual Report (github.com) 54

This week the Microsoft-owned code repository site GitHub released its annual report with statistics about its community, writes programming columnist Mike Melanson: The report offers a deep dive into three specific areas, with a look at developer productivity in the time of COVID, community and collaboration, and open source security. Highlights include increased productivity with 35% more repositories created in 2020 than 2019, a large open source community with more than 56M developers in 2020 with 100M expected by 2025, and security vulnerabilities that often go undetected for more than 4 years before being disclosed and 94% of projects relying on open source components.
"2020 has been a year of extraordinary change," notes GitHub's report. "Yet with 60M+ new repositories created this past year, one thing has remained true — developers came together from all corners of the world to innovate, find connection, and solve problems."

GitHub reports that over 1.9 billion contributions were added in the last year, with users distributed around the globe:
North America: 34%
Asia: 30.7%
Europe: 26.8%
South America: 4.9%
Africa: 2%
Oceania: 1.7%
And while JavaScript is still the most popular language used on the site, Python remains more popular (at #2) than Java (at #3) for the second year in a row.
  1. JavaScript
  2. Python
  3. Java
  4. TypeScript
  5. C#
  6. PHP
  7. C++
  8. C
  9. Shell
  10. Ruby

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Python Beats Java Again in New GitHub Annual Report

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  • Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Saturday December 05, 2020 @01:38PM (#60797992)
    And by the same survey, PHP "beats" both C and C++. Your mileage may vary.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Is this list generated by demonrats? This is clearly rigged. Perl is the #1 language and it's not even on the top ten! Riggers!
    • And a lot of the languages are written in C and/or C++.

      But popularity doesn't say anything about code quality, maintainability or dependencies on third party modules impacting reliability.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Joce640k ( 829181 )

        popularity doesn't say anything about code quality, maintainability or dependencies on third party modules impacting reliability.

        This.

        I'd say the opposite - that languages that mostly appeal to beginners aren't going to be the best languages in the long term.

        And ... JavaScript is at the top because there's no choice.

        • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          What are some of those language features that makes a language "appeal to beginners"? And what metrics are you using to determine what are the "best languages in the long term"?

          Java is pretty maintainable and reliable, despite tons of new programmers using it, while x86 assembly is the exact opposite in both respects.

          • Java is pretty maintainable and reliable, despite tons of new programmers using it

            Does Java appeal to people?

        • And ... JavaScript is at the top because there's no choice.
          There is:
          * TypeScript
          * CoffeeScript
          * grooscript

          And surely plenty more.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        And a lot of the languages are written in C and/or C++.

        But popularity doesn't say anything about code quality, maintainability or dependencies on third party modules impacting reliability.

        Indeed. Python is a whole new level of dependency hell.

      • It does not really matter in which language another language is written. Sooner or later they use their own language to reimplement the compiler/interpreter and runtime.

  • SO logic (Score:1, Insightful)

    by cygnusvis ( 6168614 )
    This only means that javascript is the most popular language among people asking for help.
  • Yes, yes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Saturday December 05, 2020 @01:45PM (#60798024)

    Lots of kids are being taught Python and posting their scripts on GitHub. We get it.

    • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      Where in this story are you getting the age of the committers from?

      • Old programmers do Cobol, C or Fortran.

        • I'm doing Haskell.

          Some people evolve. Others stay being stuck.

        • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

          That's a blunt statement presented as fact. Do you have actual evidence?

        • 30+ years as a self employed developer
          Today I do mostly php, python (back end Linux servers) along with swift/xcode(macOS, iOS) 5+ years as an Apple Developer doing in-house apps for clients.
          Lately, I have been playing with c and c++ again and taking a good look at web assembly. I will also be taking a good look at Android development.
          I stopped doing any Microsoft development work in the early 2000s
          • Did look at Java when it came out in the 90s and decided to stay clear ;)
            • Funny, Fortran was the first language I learned. Approx. 1973 in high school used an 029 punch card machine and had to send the card decks out to get run ;) The whole turn around was a week to 10 days ;)
        • I just have a splinter ridden abacus and carve output into my skin with dull flint you insensitive clod!

        • Are you sure?

        • by Pimpy ( 143938 )

          As an aging programmer you basically have the option of doing the things you've always done and hoping the market doesn't pass you by, working in a field with legacy code no one understands or cares to maintain, move on to management, or continue to learn new languages and technologies and adjust with the times. C was my first high-level language after assembly, I then spent 20+ years as a kernel programmer in which all of my programming was either in C or various assembly languages before getting tired of

  • by Marquis de Pattymelt ( 6800258 ) on Saturday December 05, 2020 @01:45PM (#60798026)
    Perl won! Perl totally won, those other lamguages are cheaters! Perl isn't a loser, it totally won bigly! Please send money so Perl can fund the lawsuits to get this totally rigged, disgraceful crime against humanity overturned. Thank You.
  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday December 05, 2020 @01:53PM (#60798044)

    Python Beats Java Again in New GitHub Annual Report

    So what. Different tools for different problems / solutions.

    The last two projects I worked on, for a large defense contractor, were done in Perl and Java.

  • ...this is the third or fourth time in few days this subject is treated here on /.
  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Saturday December 05, 2020 @03:48PM (#60798356)

    Might aswell selectively choose to say "Java beats TypeScript" or "...C#".

    Is it because nobody would even jave listened if you said JS came first?

    Sorry, still can't take this seriously. It's like the most popilar videos on YouTube. Of course numbr one is gonna be some total crap of a music video that makes Justin Bieber's first song seem like the work of a genius.

    And don't give me "If you want a job...". I don't wanta job coding in JS. Nobody does. I already did, and as you can clearly see, I'm *still* traumatized, a decade and a half later. I'd rather be a digestion tank diver.

    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      I don't wanta job coding in JS. Nobody does. I already did, and as you can clearly see, I'm *still* traumatized, a decade and a half later.

      A lot has changed in 15 years. ES 6 fixed a lot of the problems with JS and Typescript goes even further. If you go into web development now it's not nearly as bad.

  • I choose it because it's fast or easy to use

    • by nagora ( 177841 )

      I choose it because it's fast or easy to use

      Community is a factor, though. We all end up on SE at some point.

  • Everyone forgets Antarctica.
    There are probably some programmers there.
    Though it may be a rounding percent to zero.

  • by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Saturday December 05, 2020 @06:37PM (#60798752) Homepage Journal

    That proper compilers are so low in "popularity" reflects poorly on the programmer community...

    Look around, by Moore's Law, our computers today are at least 1024 times beefier than twenty years ago (a minimum of 10 doublings) — clock rates are higher (even if not 1000 times higher), much bigger on-die caches, far many cores. RAM- and disk-sizes, network speeds have also increased tremendously.

    But how is your "computing experience" — can you claim, it also improved thousand-fold? Nope... Though there are improvements, no way would I state, things are even fifty times better.

    And I blame programmers — and system admins — for "stealing" most of the hardware improvements, to make their lives easier at the expense of their users and/or customers:

    Freeing memory is hard
    Let's use garbage-collection.
    Pointers are hard
    We demand string to be a type of its own!
    Compiling is hard
    Let's use interpreters!
    Dependencies are messy
    Let's bundle everything our program needs with it.
    Dependencies are messy
    Let's install each application — with all its dependencies — into its own container of some kind.
    No one can tell a millisecond from a microsecond
    And I don't care, if you're calling my function a million times!
    Quit complaining about hardware requirements
    Just get a faster machine, I value my time — not your money!
    • Sorry, no mod points today, definitely agree though.

    • by JBrow ( 668684 )
      It's almost a postulate these days... "software improvements lag behind hardware improvements."
    • And why exactly would you not want that a String type is by its own right a type?
      And why would you not use garbage collection?

      Sorry, while I agree with you that the user experience does not match the improvements in CPU etc. Your argument are just bollocks. There are not many "purely interpreted" languages in wide spread use.

      And: the software I'm involved in usually utilizes the machine it is running on, optimal.

      • by mi ( 197448 )

        And why exactly would you not want that a String type is by its own right a type?

        Because, unlike int or double, there is no such thing in the processor.

        why would you not use garbage collection?

        Because it is a crutch — a work-around for people, who wouldn't (or cannot be bothered to) manage their memory-usage themselves. Crutches may have their purpose, but forcing everybody to use them slows everybody down — and ruins everybody's posture.

        Look at the practice — Java introduced garbage-colle

        • Because, unlike int or double, there is no such thing in the processor.
          Wrong. Mainframes since the 1970s have that ...

          The ret is just your fear about "progress".

          Tuning a GC algorithm is actually not that hard. Certainly more easy than finding the 2000 memory bugs noobs like you tend to spread into your C and C++ programs.

    • by Pimpy ( 143938 )

      You seem like someone that has only touched the surface of any of the things you're claiming to take issue with and have never bothered trying to understand what specific problems they are solving, or that computing needs have changed over time. Containers are a good example - you may start off with a large container for build-time dependencies, but then one typically create a statically linked binary and discards everything else in the final stage, so you end up with nice small purposeful containers with v

      • by mi ( 197448 )

        You seem like someone that has only touched the surface of any of the things you're claiming to take issue with and have never bothered trying to understand what specific problems they are solving

        Don't make it personal and don't attack me...

        but then one typically create a statically linked binary and discards everything else in the final stage

        What "statically linked binary"? Only the seventh most popular language, according to TFA, has such a concept at all!

        Moore's law has levelled off and pushed designs mo

  • I can't see the point of this. It purports to be a league table of some kind, but the criteria of "better" or "worse" have little bearing on whether it is worthwhile studying a particular language, or which languages are most used in real applications. If you choose to concentrate on Javascript skills, because it is the popular language, then I suggest you will drown in a swamp of mediocrity when it comes to getting a job. If you can write solid code in C and/or C++, this puts you in another class altogethe

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