Over the past year, developers collaborated in a staggering 370 primary languages on GitHub. Among the top 10 programming languages, C#, Python and Shell climbed the list this year, while Ruby and Java fell in popularity.
That’s according to the code repository’s annual Octoverse report, which also reveals a colossal 532 percent increase in the use of Google’s Dart language, as interest surges in the company’s Flutter SDK – built using Dart.
Flutter SDK Contributions Soar
Flutter, a software development kit used for both mobile and web applications, is the second-fastest growing project on GitHub.
Contributions rose 279 percent over the past year, and it is now the third largest project by contributors, with over 13,000 contributors.
(AspNetCore, a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications or websites on Windows, Mac, or Linux, is growing fastest in terms of overall contributions, which climbed 346 percent. )
Why the Popularity?
Google released version 1.0 of its Flutter SDK in December 2018.
The SDK handily lets users create mobile apps for Android and iOS from a single codebase – meaning shorter development cycles and less cost, because businesses can avoid having to develop apps for different platforms.
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As of May 2019 it also made it possible to use Flutter to develop desktop-class apps running on Windows, Mac and Linux, heavily subsiding a 30-hour online tutorial for those interested, charging the $200 course at just $10.
The Top 10 Programming Languages in 2019
Python’s rise to become the second-most widely used language on GitHub, meanwhile, is due to a “speedily-expanding” community of data science professionals and hobbyists, GitHub notes, with many core data science packages powered by Python.
(“How else can we tell data science is growing on GitHub?” the company asks: “The use of Jupyter Notebooks by number of repositories with Jupyter as their primary languag, has seen more than 100% growth year-over-year for the last three years).
More broadly, GitHub’s popularity shows no sign of waning: 1.3 million developers contributed to open source projects for the first time over the past 12 months; there were 10 million new users and 44 million new repositories created.
