The top 20 programming languages: the GitHut and Tiobe rankings

A new attempt to estimate the popularity of programming languages has been undertaken by the website GitHut. As the name suggests, GitHut uses the official GitHub API to separate programming languages and compare active repositories with other GitHub data.

Source: githut.info

Githut lists its ranking according to the following characteristics: active repositories, the number of pushes and the pushes per repository, as well as the new forks per repository, the open issues per repository and the new watcher per repository.

GitHut’s top 20 ranking currently looks like this:

1. JavaScript
2. Java
3. Python
4. Ruby
5. CSS
6. PHP
7. C++
8. C
9. Shell
10. C#
11. Objective-C
12. R
13. VimL
14. Go
15. Perl
16. CoffeeScript
17. TeX
18. Scala
19. Haskell
20. Emacs Lisp

If we compare it with the programming community index, Tiobe (who published the following ranking in its September issue) the results are quite different.

1. C
2. Java
3. Objective-C
4. C++
5. C#
6. Basic
7. PHP
8. Python
9. JavaScript
10. Transact-SQL
11. Visual Basic .NET
12. Perl
13. Ruby
14. Visual Basic
15. Delphi/Objective Pascal
16. F#
17. Pascal
18. Swift
19. MATLAB
20. PL/SQL

While Java still remains a strong player in both rankings, it is interesting to note that since this time last year, Java has slipped off the number one spot on Tiobe’s list.

You can see noticeable differences between the two lists, especially in relation to the relativity of rankings. Tiobe compiles search engine inquiries with the number of developers, courses and providers for evaluation. GitHut has the advantage of not relying on such vague criteria and it can use verifiable data of official APIs. But what relationship does GitHub data have to the worldwide distribution of programming languages?

SEE ALSO: Which programming community curses most?

It’s a mystery that will probably never be solved but in the meantime we are enjoying the visualisation of the rankings – especially since Java is prominently placed in second position in both tables!