Python Beats Java Again in New GitHub Annual Report

This week the Microsoft-owned code repository site GitHub released its annual report with statistics about its community, writes programming columnist Mike Melanson: The report offers a deep dive into three specific areas, with a look at developer productivity in the time of COVID, community and collaboration, and open source security. Highlights include increased productivity with 35% more repositories created in 2020 than 2019, a large open source community with more than 56M developers in 2020 with 100M expected by 2025, and security vulnerabilities that often go undetected for more than 4 years before being disclosed and 94% of projects relying on open source components. “2020 has been a year of extraordinary change,” notes GitHub’s report. “Yet with 60M+ new repositories created this past year, one thing has remained true — developers came together from all corners of the world to innovate, find connection, and solve problems.” GitHub reports that over 1.9 billion contributions were added in the last year, with users distributed around the globe: North America: 34% Asia: 30.7% Europe: 26.8% South America: 4.9% Africa: 2% Oceania: 1.7% And while JavaScript is still the most popular language used on the site, Python remains more popular (at #2) than Java (at #3) for the second year in a row. JavaScriptPythonJavaTypeScriptC#PHPC++CShellRuby