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The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2013

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Although it is now February, almost March, the language ranking numbers below were actually run in January in keeping with our roughly quarterly pace for updates. As we have done since 2011, we’re repeating the analysis originally performed by Drew Conway and John Myles White in December of 2010. Measurement of performance depends, of course, on what you measure. In this case, the rankings are derived from a correlation of programming traction on GitHub and Stack Overflow.

While there are many approaches to measuring language performance, none perfect, GitHub and Stack Overflow collectively represent statistically significant volumes of data. More importantly for our purposes, their respective communities, while overlapping, remain distinct and thus provide some balance to a measurement of one on a stand alone basis. The statistical correlation between the two properties has remained strong; it was .78 during the first analysis and has never been weaker since – the results below also feature a correlation of .78.

A few necessary caveats before proceeding.

  • No claims are made here that these rankings are representative of general usage more broadly. They are nothing more or less than an examination of the correlation between two populations we believe to be predictive of future use, hence their value.
  • There are many potential communities that could be surveyed for this analysis. GitHub and Stack Overflow are used here first because of their size and second because of their public exposure of the data necessary for the analysis. We encourage, however, interested parties to perform their own analyses using other sources.
  • The further down the rankings one goes, the less data available to rank languages by. The difference between spots #1 and #2, therefore, is much greater than #99 versus #100. Keep this in mind when perusing third or fourth tier languages. Exact placement is less important than tier.

With that, here is the first quarter plot for 2013.


(embiggen the chart by clicking on it)

Because of the number of languages now included in the survey and because of the nature of the plot, the above can be difficult to process even when rendered full size. Here then is a simple list of the Top 20 Programming Languages as determined by the above analysis.

  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. PHP
  4. Python
  5. Ruby
  6. C#
  7. C++
  8. C
  9. Objective-C
  10. Perl
  11. Shell
  12. Scala
  13. ASP
  14. Haskell
  15. Assembly
  16. ActionScript
  17. R
  18. CoffeeScript
  19. Visual Basic
  20. MATLAB

While there was effectively no change within the Top 10 languages – although it’s worth noting that Java picked up a ranking point since the last analysis, the only one in the Top 10 to do so – there was actually substantial movement in the bottom half of the Top 20.

  • Shell lost ground slightly, dropping into an effective tie with Perl.
  • Haskell likewise lost some ground.
  • CoffeeScript, meanwhile, benefitted from a slight retrenchment of Visual Basic.
  • Lastly, MATLAB knocked Groovy back one spot and vaulted into the Top 20, and is within two spots of its competitor R.

Notable performers outside of the Top 20 include Go, which jumped two spots to 28 (up from 32 in 2010), Ada which dropped four to 48, PowerShell which climbed two spots to 26 and Dart which jumped from 55 to 47, cracking the Top 50 for the first time. As cautioned, however, be careful about reading much into the lower rankings giving the small sample sizes involved.

In general, we see the rankings more or less stratified at the upper levels. The obvious first tier of languages does not appear to be relinquishing its hold on developer time and attention – nor moving much within that tier, but competition outside of that area is fierce. This is particularly true in specialized domains, as with statistical analysis where R has seen steady traction but little growth with competitive platforms like MATLAB showing signs of improvement.

Overall, however, the analysis of both language usage (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) confirms what we have been arguing for some time: that full scale fragmentation of language adoption is the new reality. Much as PaaS providers are currently grappling with the challenge of maximizing their addressable market via support for multiple runtimes, so too must vendors and projects in other categories work to service as many programming languages as possible. Given the opportunity to choose, developers are making choices: lots of them.

27 comments

  1. I’m not convinced that “popularity rank” is right to say that people are doing lots of choices. My gut feeling is that more than 90% are using the top 10, so I’d like to see this graph with the real magnitudes. Can you please publish the raw data?

  2. […] The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: This ranking is, more or less, updated, quarterly. It is based on the code in the GitHub public repositories and in the tags used in the Stack Overflow questions. Cobol does not appear in this ranking at all! […]

  3. Fascinating. I found one weakness – it only covers languages listed by github. There are 55 projects on github written in REALbasic but it’s not an official “language” on their list hence didn’t appear.

    (For skeptics, although proprietary, it’s a unique dialect of BASIC with a long history of being OO plus some nice ideas from Objective-C.)

  4. […] it’s been criticized for taking the name of an existing programming language, it’s also been praised by other language designers as well as systems developers — notably […]

  5. […] .Net, today’s empowered enterprise developers are spoiled for choice, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady opines. Despite a myriad of programming languages from which to choose, Python continues to more than […]

  6. […] .Net, today’s empowered enterprise developers are spoiled for choice, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady opines. Despite a myriad of programming languages from which to choose, Python continues to more than […]

  7. […] .Net, today’s empowered enterprise developers are spoiled for choice, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady opines. Despite a myriad of programming languages from which to choose, Python continues to more than […]

  8. […] Perl eventually die? Some say it will,” he added. “But if you go by a recent study from RedMonk that measures the spectrum of programming languages in use on GitHub, it is evident […]

  9. […] to measure the relevance and popularity of a language –see the TIOBE index, LangPop.com, PYPL, The RedMonk Ranking, Language Popularity Index, etc. They all show C++ alive and well. So where does this discrepancy […]

  10. […] Perl eventually die? Some contend it will,” he added. “But if we go by a recent study from RedMonk that measures a spectrum of programming languages in use on GitHub, it is clear that […]

  11. […] to the job trends tool on indeed.com.  Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk, an analyst firm, finds the top programming languages every quarter using a methodology developed originally by Dataists. O’Grady counts the number of […]

  12. […] once again released the results for January 2013 and it’s almost identical to the list from last […]

  13. […] 12. Redmonk: Redmonk sitesinden Stephen O’Grady ’nin hemen hemen her ay yaptığı çalışmada programlama dillerini Stackoverflow ve Github verilerini kullanarak popülerlik […]

  14. […] if they could choose freely. In the survey they could choose between 23 languages based on a Programming Language Ranking from Redmonk, published in January 2013. 117 developers answered it. There is some selection bias because of the […]

  15. […] languages ranked by expressiveness or popularity […]

  16. You all should do this as a d3.js based live graphic. Would be much cooler and more interesting… and get a lot more hits.

  17. I don’t understand some of the Stack Overflow rankings. For example Elixir seems to be higher than VHDL, even though there are 8 Elixir questions and 887 VHDL questions on Stack Overflow:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elixir
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vhdl

    Am I missing something here? Thank you.

  18. Io looks like an outlier in the stackoverflow/github ratio because the [io] tag refers to I/O questions. You want the [iolanguage] tag, which would put it down there near eiffel.

  19. I agree in javascript to be on top because of the following: nodejs, coffeescript, angularjs, appcelerator, mongodb..

  20. […] latest, early 2013, edition of a third programming index, which is generated by analysts at RedMonk, painted yet another very different picture. This index allocates the top position to JavaScript, […]

  21. You should weight StackOverflow Questions by their activity.
    When developing C# the big majority of questions had *at most* one answer and nearly no comments.
    Completely different with e.g. Python.

  22. […] more about programming language rankings at RedMonk and the Tiobe Community […]

  23. It’s unclear, whether the languages are represented by the centers of the words or their beginnings. E.g., how Objective-C is located, in relation to C# and C++, on the GitHub axis. Adding dots for the actual positions would help significantly.

    1. As the “Nimrod” word is before 0, I think they are represented by their centers.

  24. […] languages have problems, but look at where Ruby falls on the TIOBE index, the PYPL index, and the RedMonk ranking. It is last of the major languages in every index published. This is not a critique of how awesome […]

  25. […] The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: This ranking is, more or less, updated, quarterly. It is based on the code in the GitHub public repositories and in the tags used in theStack Overflow questions. Cobol does not appear in this ranking at all! […]

  26. […] Goはロケットのごとき勢いだ。 グーグルの恩恵と、クラウド開発を劇的に単純化する機能を備えている。そのためGoは、Redmonkのランキングで2年前は28位、わずか6ヶ月前には21位だったが、17位に上りつめるという状況となっている。 […]

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