The State of the Octoverse: top programming languages of 2018 | Hacker News Reader

The State of the Octoverse: top programming languages of 2018

blog.github.com

100 pointssahin61 comments

As long as JavaScript is the only language that runs in the browser, I expect it to stay at the top. Not necessarily because its the best or the favorite language, but because it is the only language. It is like having a chart of how many women versus men give birth. Shockingly women are still at the top.

Are you aware that one language can be compiled to another?

When a language is compiled to javascript, it's still javascript that's running in the browser.

Yes, but that's not the point: you don't have to write JavaScript yourself.

No, but you still have to suffer the fact that the language you do write in is translated to JS, and doesn't have first class browser support.

This doesn't seem to deter the users of TypeScript, one of the languages that made it to this top 10 ranking.

Apart from types, it is javascript. You even have to configure the flavor of javascript you are writing in, and many otherwise javascript-based packages provide typescript type definitions, to maintain interoperability.

That's because it was created to keep all the semantics and underlying behavior the same.

So this is not like using Python to JS, or Haskell to JS, or whatever, where there are even types (e.g. any not float numerical type) that are not supported directly by the underlying engine.

Yeah, but likely the project in that case would not count as a JavaScript repo on GitHub.

Of course. I've never actually met anyone that does it though. Though, I'm assuming that you are referring to totally different languages like C or Java, and not languages like TypeScript, which is basically JavaScript with some additional features.

It's also going through "the boom" in which everyone and their grandmother writes a new framework for it. It is dizzying at how many "BEST NEW PROGRAMMING PARADIGM" libraries arrive on the JS scene every couple of months. I work on a project that started 5 years ago and was built with BackboneJS. At that time, I hated it, I still hate it, but it was "The new best thing." Here we are 5 years later moving to React. React seems better and maybe I'm just showing my age but every JavaScript framework I see just comes across as trying too hard. Seriously? I need to download a freaking util to generate a project skeleton and also compile my project? I'm that guy, "VanillaJS because everything else is just someone trying to sell you something that doesn't fit your actual needs."

I wonder if something got lost in translation and the "thread safety" section should have been called "type safety"? It seems to be what the paragraph is talking about (though in the case of rust you could say the static typing lends it a measure of thread safety)

I agree. That paragraph is odd. They seem to be trying to use the concepts interchangeably.

> Python’s versatility and interoperability are also impressive; for example, developers can directly call Python APIs from Swift.

Well, AFAICT, there's a branch of the compiler/stdlib with an "early stage research project" that lets you call Python from Swift. It's "hard-coded" to use an 8-year-old version of Python, and they say supporting anything newer would be "non-trivial".

It's a pet peeve of mine to see people exaggerate the capabilities of software systems, especially already-popular ones that don't need free PR.

And that seems like a feature of Swift, not Python.

I think some of these stats are a bit misleading when it comes to js, and how GH calculates it. For instance, my project is mostly php (Laravel). It uses webpack to compile a few assets, really... a FEW (Vue + a few vue components + my custom code). However, those few dependencies pull in hundreds of other dependencies, which pull in a ton more and on it goes. When all is said and done and the js (my actual code) gets compiled, it's only like 50k of js, yet github classifies my project as "javascript" purely due to the number of dependencies, when in reality it's probably more like 3-5% of the entire codebase in terms of what is actually getting executed. It would be nice if you could tell GH which dir to look at to judge. For instance (with laravel) the compiled assets are placed in /public while the uncompiled assets are in /resources. I'd like it to only count JS located in /public, as that's accurate for my app in terms of js usage.

Last I checked this should be possible with some contortions on your end; Linguist (the tool GitHub uses to detect repo language) has some hardcoded paths which it will ignore for the purpose of counting lines of code. See this issue where Servo managed to convince GitHub to count it as a Rust project rather than an HTML project: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/6332

Given that Resume Driven Development is (likely) heavily influenced by surveys like these as developer look at them and think "maybe I really should make the switch to everything JavaScript?". If what you say is true then js could actually become more popular than it really is in reality in some sort of bizarre, comical, global software development "fake it till you make it" kind of way.

Are you committing your libs? If yes, you probably shouldn't. If no, then GitHub is only calculating your actual js LOC.

Interesting data but why did they show the breakdown of popularity by geographic area as a line graph and label it as a trend? It makes it look like eg python is losing popularity at first glance but the lines are actually meaningless

Every time I see something like this I’m reminded how easy it is to get into a bubble in this industry. If you were going by hacker news, you’d think Go and Rust would be way higher ranked.

Well they're both on the 'fastest growing'[1] list, which is about what I'd expect.

1: https://blog.github.com/2018-11-15-state-of-the-octoverse-to...

Or Lisp and Haskell :)

The chosen visualizations are not helpful. They look like slides from a slide deck for executives. The green blobs in the corners are not related to to the data. Geographic data should be shown on a map.

You seem to be nitpicking, they were easy enough to read and displayed information as indicated by their labels.

How do you graphically show top 10s on a map without just making it into text lists with a background instead of title?

I actually would object that geographic data should rarely be shown on a map.

A data visualization should be chosen such that it helps the viewer to better understand the information contained within.

Maps are great at showing some very specific types of information, namely boundaries around areas and the positions of those bounded areas relative to one another. If you have information that is intimately related to those boundaries and areas, then by all means plot the information on a picture of those.

The geographical regions in the article serve only as categories. There is no intent to educate or present the relative positions of those regions to one another.

You criticize the extraneous green blobs. What benefit and clarity is gained by adding other blobs (shapes on a map) and divorcing the relative ranking from an easy-to-interpret linear scale? How does that aid in understanding the relative popularity of languages?

Maps can serve as a chart of data relations and/or a listing for easy lookup. But, yeah, it's disappointing most people dislike non-map charts with geographic categories.

"Rust and Kotlin are also on the rise, both of which find built-in audiences in JavaScript and Java, respectively."

Is this a typo? Why is rust drawing an audience from javascript programmers? I would imagine c and c++ to have more synergy here.

Agreed. I know there's been some buzz about compiling to WASM but that hardly seems as related as Kotlin's "also runs on the JVM, isn't Java and can be automatically generated from .java source files"

It seems like the sentence would make more sense if it was talking about TypeScript and Kotlin instead.

Maybe people who want to get into systems programming and choosing rust rather than C. Many JS devs do seem to prefer new glittering things.

pretty sure Rust should have been Typescript in that sentence, otherwise it makes no sense.

We're seeing a lot of interest for two reasons:

* WebAssembly

* "I've always wanted to try something lower-level"

That said, this reads like a typo to me, I think it should be TypeScript.

Maybe add TS into the mix, but I doubt it's a typo. TS is just a subset of JS.

I'm a JS developer and learning Rust is one of my side projects. I've built a few hobby projects that combine both. They work well together and Rust is a much friendlier language to work with than C/C++ (IMHO).

> TS is just a subset of JS.

Semantic typo: you meant superset of subset of JS.

(pedantically that predicate would apply to all other languages in the universe)

The reason that it would have an “in-built audience” is due to the superset relationship, that’s why I think it is.

For TS? I actually wonder how much of the TS stat is due to Angular. I only picked up TS because it's required to use Angular. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have bothered. TS is fine, but I have yet to see any real benefit compared to plain JS.

Rust going up in popularity is pretty cool, though. I can think of production cases I'd use it for on the server side.

Since all JS is TS, it's very easy to transition to. Similar to how Kotlin runs on the JVM, and is sort of, if you squint, just a nicer syntax for Java.

Anyway, who knows, it's not really that important.

Glad you have some use-cases in mind for Rust :). If you ever need anything, feel free to reach out!

I think it's a typo but anyone who has used javascript for a few years probably yearns for something like rust haha

It was a typo, and it has been fixed:

"Rust and Kotlin are also on the rise, both of which find built-in audiences in C and Java, respectively."

> Rust and Kotlin are also on the rise, both of which find built-in audiences in JavaScript and Java, respectively.

I would have said C and C++ for Rust. Are Java developers actually even in the same universe as Rust?

Rust -> JavaScript

Kotlin -> Java

Which is still somewhat weird and they were probably thinking about TypeScript, not Rust

I believe there was a typo responsible for this confusion.

What about languages like Haskell, which are also growing nowadays?

Growing sure, but still extremely niche. I think a recent report showed ~15 open jobs worldwide. A lot of Haskell users learn it for intellectual curiosity rather than any expectation of actually using it at work.

I get what you mean, but I bet it’s more than 15 :) Hell, I bet just FB has more Haskell openings than that.

Anyone have any insight on the relative popularity of C in Asia?

I find the rank graphs in this post a bit unsatisfying - I keep wanting to see what the relative magnitudes are. I've been experimenting with a visualisation that combines rank and magnitude. It needs another few iterations but I think the direction is promising:

https://netograph.io/data/stats/connections?q=all

> Type Safety (?) [Used as a reason for current popularity]

This is odd, specially coming from GitHub. Not only does static typing not always guarantee type safety nor dynamic typing always ensures a lack of it (python, for instance, is strongly typed) but both of them have existed for over fifty years.

The PHP plateau, then decline in just the last 2 years in interesting.

tbh I'm surprised it took this long, PHP has been unfashionable for a very long time now. I suspect some of it might be because Django has become "the new wordpress" in many ways, and some because a lot of PHP users are one-man-bands who could already do JS and so find it natural to move onto Node.

I thought that PHP 7 would have staved it off a little longer.

The large majority of ISPs still only does Perl and PHP on their classical offerings, and I know which of the two I would rather use.

CMake is on the rise? Anyone has an explanation for that?

Edit: I mean it's an old build system for C. Is there some new developments that would cause it to rise in popularity?

CMake is “common make” not “C make”, it can make anything, and package it with CPack, test with CTest and so on. It’s still being developed too.

It seems like the most popular option for portable C and C+++ builds. It seems to have solved the nasty Windows build problem the best, as far as I can tell.

Autoconf is another option, but it doesn't support windows. I think people perceive CMake is old and gross, but autoconf is older and grosser as far as I can tell.

For example, LLVM now uses CMake. It used to use autoconf.

I don't know of any new developments, but I think people do want to get off of autoconf.

It is becoming more popular because it is more powerful / advanced than Makefile:

find_package( Readline )

include_directories( ${Readline_INCLUDE_DIR} )

Top Programming Languages.....bit of a title there eh

I know for sure without looking that there's less C than could have been and no Snigl [0] in there, since I recently packed up my stuff and moved to GitLab. For my needs, the platform is fine; and they embrace remote workers, which I think is great; the only thing it's missing is users. As it stands, 1 star on GitLab is worth a thousand on the hub.

https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl

Edit: Down voting without commenting obviously makes this a worse place for discussions. May I suggest stopping for a second and reflecting on your motivations?

GitHub also embraces remote work. About 2/3 of GitHub is remote.

I'm not saying move back to GitHub because of that, but it's one of the many things that GitHub and GitLab share in common.

That's cool, didn't know. We need more of that, some people just don't function very well in office environments and the talent is often somewhere else.

Right now though, everything is up in the air when it comes to GitHub. I would be very surprised if it just keeps humming along under Microsoft's weight.

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