14 DAY TRIAL // GitHub has published a graph which details how the most popular programming languages have changed on its platform since 2008, the year the service launched.
The data was collected through Linguist, a Ruby library developed internally by GitHub, responsible for showing programming language stats at the top of each GitHub source code repository.
The GitHub team collected information from both public and private repos, all projects, excluding forks.
JavaScript is the all-time most popular language on GitHub
As the graph shows, JavaScript is the clear-cut winner, being ranked #2 for GitHub's first five years of existence, then grabbing the #1 spot and not looking like it plans to let it go anytime soon.
This can be largely attributed to jQuery in the first period, then to the rise of Node.js, AngularJS, and ES6, all technologies that have helped move JavaScript's standards forward.
The other dominant language in GitHub's history is Ruby, which held the #1 spot since 2008 until 2012, then dropped to #2 the following year, and has been ranked #3 for the past 2 years.
Ruby's early dominance is due to the fact that GitHub itself mainly runs on a Ruby architecture, and its founders were important open source contributors to the Ruby ecosystem, even before they started GitHub.
Also, Ruby on Rails, the most important Ruby Web framework chose to move its development to GitHub right after the company started, which helped it gain traction in the Ruby community right from the get-go.
Android's success drove Java up the charts
The biggest riser in the GitHub all-time popularity graph is Java, which started ranked as #7 and is now #2.
Obviously, Android had a big part to play in Java's rising market share amongst programmers, the language being previously known as the favorite tool for the closed source enterprise market, something that you wouldn't generally work with unless someone had a gun to your head.
CSS is the second biggest winner, occupying the #6 spot in 2015, while, in 2012, it wasn't even ranked in the top 10. This can be explained with one single word: CSS3.
But wherever we have winners, we also have losers, and the main two are C and Perl.
C initially started ranked #5, slowly losing traction with developers, which recently started preferring C++ even more, C being ranked only #9 in 2015.
Perl has seen the biggest decline, being ranked #6 in 2008 and even going up to #5 in 2009, but it took a big dive in the next 2 years, completely falling out of the top 10 in 2012 and not making a return ever since.
This happened even if most CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - Perl module repository) authors started moving their Perl modules to GitHub.
