RedMonk just published their latest survey of Github’s most popular languages, and given Github’s continuous growth in popularity, they are worth a look.

Here are the results at a glance:

Javascript is seeing a consistent and serious growth.

Ruby is in sharp decline.

Python is showing a decline as well, although not as severe as Ruby.

Java is showing some growth, and it’s also the only JVM language in the top 12 listed by Red Monk.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Python is being replaced by Go. I don’t have a lot of information to back up this prediction except that most of the positive articles I read about Go are written by Python developers, and a lot of them say that they are now actively migrating their code base from Python to Go. I don’t see as much enthusiasm for Go from developers using statically typed languages, probably because of Go’s antiquated type system (which is still a big step up from Python, obviously).

It’s interesting to see Java continue to grow twenty years after its introduction. I think this constant growth is fueled by the language’s remarkable versatility and its ability to adapt to new technologies but also driven by a series of constant popularity boosts such as Android five years ago and Java 8 this year.

I’m surprised not to see Groovy in this top 12 of languages, since it’s usually acknowledged as the second most popular language on the JVM and I expected its popularity grow thanks to Gradle, but this doesn’t seem to be enough to crack the top 12 on Red Monk.

Update: Discussion on reddit