Top 10 most popular language of 2019 according to GitHub

GitHub has slowly become a hub that more than 40 million developers use to share code for their projects – professional, personal or other.

It wasn't until last year when Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion! It quickly became one of the key ingredients in its strategy for attracting developers on its cloud considering the competition with Google and Amazon.

As one of the largest online spots for developers, GitHub makes the perfect place to track what are the most popular languages among developers. It does so by releasing the annual report called The State of the Octoverse. Just last week the new report came and gave us insights on which technologies are being used by developers worldwide.

Here are the top 10 most popular language of 2019 according to GitHub:

1. Javascript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. C++
7. TypeScript
8. Shell
9. C
10. Ruby

Let's start with the list upside down.

Ruby

Ruby is an open-source programing language that focuses on being simple to use. It was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz, who first was the first to blend the best parts of the most popular languages. It was released back in 1995, and it's becoming more and more popular. Ruby even got to the point of having several conferences and meetups based on the Ruby language.

C

C is, as well-known, one of the oldest programming languages that is still very relevant to the field. It was developed by Dennis Ritchie back in 1972! It was originally designed to be a general-purpose language, to be used for programming a wide array of computer systems and hardware. A lot of popular languages today are based on C, including Java, PHP, and Javascript.

Shell

Shell is very popular when it comes to the IT departments, purely becuase it allows them to write commands that directly tell the OS what to do. It can be used when you need to automate processes like installing, uninstalling remotely, or manage the backups on a daily bases.

TypeScript

TypeScript is developed by Microsoft and is an open-source programming language. Not only is it one of the most popular languages, but it's also one of the fastest-growing in the industry.  It has very similar syntax and semantics to JavaScript, but with a lot more powerful features that help developers build applications that are large-scale. Obviously, it's supported by Microsoft's free code editor Visual Code Studio, which is the top open-source project on GitHub.

C++

The C++ programming language builds off of C and goes back as far as 1979 when it comes to it being created. Bjarne Stroustrup created it while working on his Ph.D. thesis, and treated it as an additional feature of C. To this day, it's still being widely used, considering that it's the core of many operating systems, browser and games.

C#

C# was developed by Microsoft in a team that was lead by Anders Hejlsberg. It's awfully similar to the Java language and is mostly used in mobile apps, games and enterprise software.

PHP

PHP, an acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor, is an open-source programming language used for mobile development and creating very interactive web pages. It works very well with databases, and it has been used by Facebook and Yahoo in the past. It's often dubbed as one of the worst programming languages among developers.

JAVA

Java was first developed by the Sun Microsystems company back in 1995 and was later on acquired by Oracle. This open-source language is currently being used by very large companies like Twitter and Netflix. Java has been used for, well pretty much everything, including web apps, games, mobile development, and database-driven software. It's also very similar to C++ and C#, which makes it a lot easier to switch between those languages.

Python

Python is simultaneously one of the most popular and fastest-growing programming languages in GitHub. Speaking of popularity, it came from third place last year to the second in 2019. Python is constantly being used for artificial intelligence apps and data science and is well-known to be one of the easiest programming languages to get started with. Needless to say, Python has a very large community and holds annual meetups dedicated to it.

JavaScript

2019 is still JavaScript's year. JavaScript undoubtedly tops the top 10 most popular language of 2019 according to the GitHub list. It's really no surprise when it comes to it, considering that it helps make websites interactive and can also be used to create games. Not to forget to mention the ReactNative framework for building apps compatible with iOS and Android.

Which programming language pays the most in 2019?

Relevant to the topic, you might want to know which programming language pays the most in 2019.

The highest-paid programming languages in 2019 are:

1. Scala
2. Clojure
3. Go
4. Erlang
5. WebAssembly
6. Kotlin
7. Rust,
8. F#
9. and Elixir
11. According to the Stack Overflows survey of 2019, the following programming languages are synonymous with the highest wages in the industry.Note: This data is according to Stack Overflow's Developer Survey of 2019 for the highest paid programming languages in 2019 list
12. To read more, check out our blog on which programming language pays the most in 2019.

• Malbolge
• Brainfu*k
• COW
  INTERCAL
• Whitespace

Malbolge was created back in 1998 and considered the most difficult one out of all. After the invention, it took more than 2 years for a program to be written on it.

“Hello world” looked something like this:

COW was created in 2003 by Sean Heber, and the whole language consists of only 12 instructions – and all of them are moo or its variations.

Whitespace was developed by Edwin Brady in 2003, April 1st. The program is made using only spaces, tabs, and linefeeds. Everything else is pretty much ignored by the interpreter.

“Hello world” looked something like this:

3. Got something to add to the “Top 10 most popular language of 2019 according to GitHub”? Contact us and let us know.

Alicia Newman

Alicia leads content strategy for LearnWorthy managing a team of content producers, strategists, and copywriters. She creatively oversees content programs, awareness campaigns, research reports, and other integrated marketing projects.