Update: March 19th – there was a typo in our initial data scrape, and Python v’s PHP were in the wrong positions for 2018. Updated now.
Following our twitter chat yesterday on the latest RedMonk Language Rankings I created a visualisation to highlight relative movements over time (large version). For a more detailed discussion on the most recent rankings please refer to Stephen O’Grady’s write up.
The most striking aspect is just how stable the top ten languages are. This reflects the investment people make in learning a language and the reality that shifts in the languages that businesses use to develop software happens slowly.
Other aspects that stand out are the rapid decline in Perl, the stabilisation of Ruby and the ascent of Swift. But sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.