Top 10 programming languages of 2023 in GitHub report

GitHub, a platform for software developers, has published a report that studies open-source activity around big trends in programming, the influence of AI, and the cloud in 2023. The report also highlights the most active communities, which includes Poland this year, as well as the top 10 programming languages used on the platform.

AIN.Capital shares the key points of the report.

Three big trends

• Developers are building with generative AI in big numbers. More developers are experimenting with foundation models from OpenAI and other AI players, with open-source generative AI projects even entering the top 10 most popular open-source projects by contributor count in 2023.
• Developers are operating cloud-native applications at scale. There has also been an increase in declarative languages using Git-based infrastructure as code workflows, greater standardization in cloud deployments, and higher user rates for cloud-native technologies.
• 2023 saw the largest number of first-time open-source contributors. This year, commercially backed open-source projects continue to capture the largest share of first-time contributors and overall contributions on the platform.

In general, the GitHub community and activities taken into account when writing the report comprise 420 million projects, 284 million public repositories, 65,000 public generative AI projects, and 4.5 billion total contributors.

• The Polish community was highlighted as the third fastest-growing developer community in Europe. In 2023, there’s been an influx of around 1.2 million developers to the platform, compared to 2022.
• Regarding the usage of gen AI, just halfway through 2023, there was more than twice the number of generative AI projects as in all of 2022.
• Generative AI is driving a significant and global spike in individual contributors to generative AI projects with 148% YoY growth— and a 248% YoY increase in the total number of generative AI projects, too.

Top 10 programming languages on GitHub

• In 2023, JavaScript has once again taken the crown for the top one most popular language, and we continue to see familiar languages, such as Python and Java, remain in the top five languages year over year.

• There has been a notable increase in popular languages and frameworks for data analytics and operations, such as T-SQL and TeX. This highlights how data scientists, mathematicians, and analysts are increasingly engaging with open-source platforms and tooling.
• We also see remarkable parity with the most popular languages used in projects created in 2023 when compared to the overall most popular languages used across GitHub. Some notable outliers include Kotlin, Rust, Go, and Lua, which have seen larger growth across newer projects on GitHub.
• Rust continues to attract more and more developers. While its overall usage is comparatively low to other languages, it is growing at 40% YoY.