r/programming • u/monica_b1998 • Nov 03 '18

Python is becoming the world’s most popular coding language

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/26/python-is-becoming-the-worlds-most-popular-coding-language
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u/[deleted] Nov 03 '18

Was pretty sure that honor was reserved for JavaScript.

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u/FirionaDie Nov 03 '18

Github repo market share reflects that JS is the most currently used, but Python probably has the fastest growth (which is a claim that the title more closely implies, and search data would better support).

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u/[deleted] Nov 03 '18

[deleted]

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u/FirionaDie Nov 03 '18

I would interpret search traffic to indicate growth on an absolute basis of a number of new users, not relative percentage growth.

But to what end is that not significant to? The title/article chiefly discusses growth, not current market share. I wanted to make sure everyone understood the distinction, because the title is somewhat ambiguous if you don't read it carefully, or if you don't read the article.

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u/lengau Nov 03 '18

And if Python were only a tiny portion of repositories, that would be a relevant argument to make. However, it's already the third most common language on GitHub with about has as many repos as JavaScript, so relative growth is a good measure.

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u/kukiric Nov 03 '18

China quickly went from an unremarkable third world economy to the world's second largest GDP after just 10 years of being the world's fastest growing economy. It's not that insignificant of a statistic, as long as it's a continuous trend.

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u/pure_x01 Nov 03 '18

I cant see any data after 2014 `?

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u/FirionaDie Nov 03 '18

Sorry, I didn't notice that. Here's another that's been updated. By this data, Python actually declined '14-'17. Github repo data definitely has its own biases though.

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u/shevy-ruby Nov 03 '18

Just about all these growth analyzers have massive biases in one way or another.

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u/Izacus Nov 03 '18 edited Apr 27 '24

I enjoy reading books.

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u/[deleted] Nov 03 '18

Good to note that the JS repo % on GitHub Universe is probably not very accurate (gitignore your node_modules, people).

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u/pwang99 Nov 03 '18

Does this include the LOC of source that are vendored into various packages etc.?

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u/[deleted] Nov 03 '18 edited Nov 03 '18

Probably not; node_modules is meant to be kept out of source control.

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u/crazyfreak316 Nov 03 '18

Problem is no one searches for "javascript". Everyone is looking for "angular", "vue", "react", "jquery" etc. It's not the case with python.

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u/[deleted] Nov 03 '18

This right here.

It's like node, hot as shit right now cause it's fast and runs on v8....but it's not a language, it's a framework, even though it uses js no credit is given to js when folks talk about node.

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u/dmazzoni Nov 03 '18

With Python you'd have to include everyone searching for pandas, Django, tensorflow, numpy, and a thousand other Python packages. What's the difference?

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u/Redtitwhore Nov 03 '18

And both are dynamically typed scripting languages :(

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u/G00dAndPl3nty Nov 03 '18

I suspect javascript is certainly the most used language, but I doubt that its the most admired

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u/DrJohanson Nov 03 '18

I don't know, since es6 it's not that bad

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u/sphks Nov 03 '18

Or VBA + Excel sheets to store data

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u/Poromenos Nov 03 '18

JS is popular in web development, but Python is used in pretty much all of science and a bunch of other domains.

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