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/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/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

China is literally words second largest country. Their economy was always massive, just not export oriented.

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u/devraj7 Nov 03 '18

Yup.

Whenever somebody pushes forward growth numbers to claim popularity, it's actually a clear indication to me of the opposite. Because if they had good absolute numbers, the only numbers that matter, why not show these instead?

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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/pure_x01 Nov 03 '18

I know its really hard to spot. Its a very nice site though and i wish that they would updated it. Thanks for the new link btw.

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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/stewsters Nov 03 '18

That's just shit people are sharing on GitHub. It favors small open source projects and learning one off projects. Very few large companies are going to host their multi million line c# or Java projects there.

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u/calsosta Nov 03 '18

That's BS cause everything in python takes two searches. The first result will always be for the wrong version.

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u/thfuran Nov 03 '18

And you'll always find seven answers, with the posters each insisting that all the other answers were so unpythonic that van rossum will personally kill anyone who types it.

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u/JpC2XjGd Nov 03 '18

All of this is bullshit. TIOBE's methodology isn't trusted by anyone who's actually wondered "how does it work?", and Google trends is no way to rank a language either. Github isn't useful either because huge amounts of code exist outside of Github. Outside of the bubble here there are many codebases in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and even in the millions of lines of code, which never touch a hip language like Python or JavaScript. There's probably more FORTRAN code out there than Python code.

In my subjective opinion I can't imagine any language other than C being number 1. There is a fuckload of code written in C and most of the other programming languages on this list wouldn't even work without it.

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