Analyst firm RedMonk periodically publishes rankings of the Top 20 programming languages, as measured by activity on StackOverflow and number of repositories on GitHub. In their most recent ranking (January 2014), R is ranked #15 amongst all programming languages. An impressive ranking for a domain-specific language; the top 3 were the general-purpose languages Java, Javascript and PHP. Here's a chart of the raw rankings in both dimensions (and astute readers will notice from the ggplot2 chart that the ranking analysis itself was done in R):
Analyst Stephen O'Grady comments on the popularity of statistical languages in the latest rankings:
Both R and Matlab experienced gains this quarter, and this was the third consecutive quarter of growth for R in particular. While, as the plot indicates, these languages tend to outperform on Stack Overflow relative to GitHub, they are indicative of a continued rise in popularity for statistical analysis languages more broadly.
Also note the appearance of newcomer Julia on the chart, which has already attracted an impressive following in both GitHub and (to a lesser extent), StackOverflow.
O'Grady also noted that GitHub has sadly retired their rankings of top programming languages by number of repositories, but this analysis cleverly recreates the count of GitHib repositories using Google BigQuery and the GitHub Archive. Nonetheless, it does mean the methodology behind this analysis is slightly different than that of previous RedMonk programming language rankings.
RedMonk: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2014
Hmmm,
Stack Overflow is used when people have problems and need help, GitHub is used when people have already achieved something with a particular language. Take a look at the original chart and see VimL as the winner language: People publish results with no need to ask questions before. That appears to be the best place on this chart. Wouldn't you want your language to be well below the black line. R happens to be above it. Which probably is not because it is so complicated (Haskell is below the line) but probably because people use VimL because they want to and R partly because they are made to.
Question: Compare Common Lisp and Scheme. Both with roughly the same impact on GitHub but much less activity on StackOverflow. Does this count in favour of scheme or in favour of Common Lisp??
Still scratching my head,
Bernhard
Posted by: Bernhard | February 04, 2014 at 00:36
> GitHub is used when people have already achieved something with a particular language.
R used http://cran.r-project.org/ :)
Posted by: Petrov Sergei | February 05, 2014 at 01:23