At GitHub, JavaScript rules in usage, TensorFlow leads in forks

JavaScript is the most-popular language on GitHub, based on pull requests from the popular code-sharing site.

Since September 2016, there have been 2.3 million pull requests for JavaScript, GitHub reports. Following web development staple JavaScript was Python, with 1 million requests, and Java, with 986,000 requests. Python displaced Java as the second-most-popular language on GItHub. Also improving its lot greatly in 2017 was TypeScript, Microsoft’s typed superset of JavaScript, which had 207,000 pull requests, almost four times as many requests as it had the year before.

The 15 most popular languages were:

1. JavaScript, with 2.3 million pull requests
2. Python, with 1 million
3. Java, with 985,000
4. Ruby, with 870,000
5. PHP, with 559,000
6. C++, with 413,000
7. CSS, with 335,000
8. C#, with 326,000
9. Go, with 285,000
10. C, with 239,000
11. TypeScript, with 207,000
12. Shell, with 206,000
13. Swift, with 107,000
14. Scala, with 99,000
15. Objective-C, with 66,000

GitHub’s popularity numbers differ from the Tiobe and Pypl indexes, which gauge language popularity based on formulas that look at search engine queries. Tiobe has Java and C in first and second place this month, with Python and JavaScript in fifth and sixth places. Pypl has Java and Python as its top two languages, with JavaScript in fourth place. But RedMonk, which has used a formula assessing GitHub pull requests and Stack Overflow language conversations, did have JavaScript in first place and Java in second place in its June rankings.

GitHub also tallied the most-forked projects for the last 12 months:

1. TensorFlow machine learning library, with 24,000 forks.
2. Bootstrap web framework, with 15,000
3. Gitignore file templates, with 10,800
4. Jekyll-now blog software, with 10,700.
5. TensorFlow models, with 8,300.

The most popular projects on GitHub based on the number of contributors were:

1. Microsoft Visual Studio Code editor, with 15,000 contributors.
2. Facebook React Native mobile apps framework, with 8,800
3. NPM JavaScript package manager, with 7,600
4. TensorFlow, with 7,300
5. Angular-CLI command line interface, with 7,400

GitHub said the site reached 24 million developers in 2017, working across 67 million repositories. The site is used in 200 countries, with North America accounting for 5.9 million accounts. The 100 millionth pull request on GitHub happened this year.