Python has become the second most popular programming language after JavaScript, according to a January 2021 RedMonk report. Previously, this position was confidently held for a long time by Java, but at the beginning of the year this Java moved to the third line of the rating, which is formed on the basis of information from the GitHub repositories. To be precise, the pair of JavaScript and Java have kept the top 2 popularity of programming languages since the beginning of the formation of the specified rating, that is, since 2012.
The popularity of JS and Java and their top positions in the ranking are expected. JavaScript has been the main language of web development for many years, when as Java is the standard in Android development and in the field of enterprise applications.
The rating does not quite correctly take into account such specific scientific languages as Mathematica, because the main scope of their application and communities are outside the resources on the basis of which the rating was compiled.
The main reason for the growth of Python in the ranking researchers say is the versatility of the language. Like Java, Python is used in a myriad of fields and can handle very different tasks. This flexibility is what makes Python so attractive to many developers around the world. This factor is complemented by a low threshold for entering the language, so that the army of “pythonists”, as in the case of PHP or JS, is constantly replenished with new and new people.
The rise in popularity of Python looks even more impressive when you think about the end of support for Python2 and the prospect of the forced migration of many projects to Python3 or rewriting them for other programming languages. Of course, Python2 support was scheduled to end in 2015, but it took the community a lot longer to adapt to the changes.
Overall, the entire ranking provides some food for thought. Comfortable PHP is expected to be on the fourth line of the rating, but two such serious languages as C# and C++ follow. At the 11th position, Swift is barely ahead of Objective-C, which it supposedly was supposed to almost completely replace. The “hype” languages of recent years – Scala, Go and Kotlin – are generally in the second ten.
The fall of Kotlin, the second fastest growing programming language in history after Swift, is especially felt. At the start, Kotlin immediately burst into the top 5 of the RedMonk rating, but it was just a one-time surge: the language from JetBrains could not stay even in the top ten, and its popularity only decreases from month to month. This month, Kotlin added one line and moved from 20th to 19th place, but only time will tell if this growth is constant or just “seasonal” fluctuations. It is likely that it will fix at some point in the second ten, as it was with Swift.
All ratings were compiled against the GitHub Archive database with cross-validation against StackOverflow databases. These two resources were used to collect statistics, as they are the largest developer communities in the world.
