{"id":6148,"date":"2026-04-14T12:59:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T16:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/?p=6148"},"modified":"2026-04-14T18:05:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T22:05:05","slug":"language-rankings-1-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2026\/04\/14\/language-rankings-1-26\/","title":{"rendered":"The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n This iteration of the RedMonk programming Language Rankings is brought to you by Amazon Web Services. AWS manages a variety of developer communities<\/a> where you can join and learn more about building modern applications in your preferred language.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This edition of the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings is either three months late or two months early, depending on whether you go by the calendar year or when we have been dropping our Q1 results lately. In any event, we have been hard at work not only compiling the latest rankings for your inspection, but also grappling with anomalies both transient and existential.<\/p>\n

The latter issue, as my colleague discussed in detail here<\/a>, is well understood. With the rise of ever more sophisticated coding assistance tools, Stack Overflow\u2019s relevance to a generation of developers has been in decline, with the result being that its tags which make up part of half of these rankings are growing more slowly and are therefore less representative. And thus Stack Overflow\u2019s position and prominence in our rankings has also come into question. Should it still be one axis of our rankings? And if not, what might replace it?<\/p>\n

As obvious as that question might have been, however, the one that has more recently thrown us for a loop is an anomalously low second half\u2019s worth of pull requests from GitHub. We\u2019re honestly not sure what to make of a decline in the volume of PRs in a time when the velocity of code creation is rising due to coding assist tools. It\u2019s possible that this is an artifact of bad or missing data from the GitHub Archive. Or it could be that while code creation is accelerating, the percentage of code committed to open repositories is declining. We\u2019ll continue to explore the question, but as you consider this iteration of the rankings it\u2019s important to note that there are not just questions about one axis this run but two.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, however, as a reminder, this work is a continuation of the work originally performed by Drew Conway and John Myles White late in 2010. While the specific means of collection has changed, the basic process remains the same: we extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.<\/p>\n

Our Current Process<\/h2>\n

The data source used for the GitHub portion of the analysis is the GitHub Archive. We query languages by pull request in a manner similar to the one GitHub used to assemble the State of the Octoverse. Our query is designed to be as comparable as possible to the previous process.<\/p>\n