Mentioned in the article - Android. It is the most popular mobile phone OS in the world right now.
Also probably that enterprises started migrating to Github. At the beginning it was probably early adopters platform with the languages that early adopters use.
Early adopters also use Java.
This is of course true in the trivial sense, but he means languages disproportionately used by early adopters (Ruby, Python, Go, etc.).
Yup, a large number of apps + a significant number of custom ROMs. It seems like GitHub became a standard for XDA-developers.
Well, JavaScript has already gotten the first place. It doesn't get any 'steeper' than that.
Steeper meaning a larger upwards delta. Starting at #2 and going to #1 is less "steep" than, say, starting at #7 and going to #4.
I think this is due to many existing projects moving to GitHub. With Google Code stagnating (and now shutting down), and a lot of Apache work being done on GitHub, I imagine many of the new repositories are actually just moves.
I'm under the impression that with Java 8 Java is becoming much more popular again. And rightfully so IMO.
Of course Java. It's still one of the best platforms out there, especially if you weigh in performance, stability and availability of open source libraries and free or cheap hosting.
Minecraft modding.
Java is great for middleware and backend systems.
They realized that Python / Ruby isn't that good for backend projects.
> They realized that Python / Ruby isn't that good for backend projects.
That's why both Github and Travis CI are coded in Ruby,hey ?
Like many startup they go with ruby as a PoC because it's fast to implement, now when you need a really solid and performant backend you don't use ruby / python.