I’ve been following few programming language statistics for many years. There are a number of data sources including code repositories, Question and Answer discussions, job vacancies , social media mentions and shares, tutorial page visits, learning video views, surveys and more. Data is published at different times, none can be considered accurate and all have some flaws — but they can be useful for spotting industry trends.

GitHut

GitHut is a relatively new and useful resource  which can amazingly analyse 2.2 million active repositories on GitHub. The top ten in the list are:
  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. Python
  4. CSS
  5. PHP
  6. Ruby
  7. C++
  8. C
  9. Shell
  10. C#
Source: GitHut
Java8,731
PHP8,238
Objective-C5,859
Java for Android4,312
SQL3,553
JavaScript3,154
Ruby2,937
C#2,549
Python1,587
C++1,273
C685
ActionScript674
ASP.net492
Perl224
Scala143
Visual Basic92

Above are the statistics of year 2014

RedMonk

The RedMonk’s language ranking for the year 2015 determines the popularity by analysing activity on both GitHub and StackOverflow. The result found is:
  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. PHP
  4. Python
  5. C#
  6. C++
  7. Ruby
  8. CSS
  9. C
  10. Objective-C
Credit: RedMonk

TIOBE Index

The TIOBE Index reviews and rates the languages on the number of skilled engineers, courses and search engine rankings of many websites.
  1. C
  2. Java
  3. C++
  4. Objective-C
  5. C#
  6. JavaScript
  7. PHP
  8. Python
  9. VisualBasic.NET
  10. Visual Basic

Completely Unscientific Meta-Survey Ranking

If we combine all the above four surveys, we arrive at this result:
  1. Java (all)
  2. JavaScript
  3. PHP
  4. Python
  5. C / C++
  6. C#
  7. Objective-C
  8. Ruby
  9. Visual Basic
I combined C and C++ and ignored CSS and shell scripting. CSS isn’t a programming language as such although preprocessors come close.

Observations and Caveats

GitHut and RedMonk are  quite similar but that’s to be expected since they use GitHub as a primary source of data. Both websites analyse public rather than private repositories which could sway results towards open source technologies.
TIOBE is influenced by the search engine resources. This is possibly why still C tops their chart — the language was developed in the year 1969 and many historical documents are still available. Newer languages such as Ruby and Go inevitably appear further down the chart.
Educational resources are likely to affect the results. For example, Python is one of the most commonly used to learn programming in high schools and colleges. Many students are asking questions and completing projects but, according to few website and analysing everything, Python jobs are rare as compared to PHP or Ruby despite it being higher in several charts , its due to education at high schools and colleges. Java has quite a similar advantage since it has a various uses in education, web development , desktop and mobile development.
Demand for the native app developers although remains high especially in the job-related surveys. RedMonk has reported that Swift jumped over 46 places to number 22 in less than six months.That’s and amazing reach! However, app development is a young discipline which everyone should know. There are far more job vacancies in web and desktop programming but they are easier to fill so adverts are possibly removed sooner.
Finally, language use has an impact.
  1. A single web site or application requires a countless or extremely great number of things and technologies which possibly raises them above desktop languages.
  2. You can also create a quick and dirty code examples in a few lines of CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python or shell script. That’s not necessarily the case for languages such as C, C#, Objective-C and Java which tends to be used for fewer larger projects.

What Surveys Won’t Tell You

There is no “best” language.
Few developers have the luxury (or tedium?) of working with a single technology.
If you’re considering some client-side JavaScript, you won’t get far without a perfect and solid understanding of HTML, CSS, image formats, tools and browser tweaks. Server-side NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, .NET and Java developers normally require an understanding of web servers, HTTP, SQL/NoSQL databases and data-exchange formats such as XML and JSON. Even those writing a basic native mobile or desktop app on a single platform require web connectivity, data store, IDE and build tool experience.
The more technologies you know ; the more you need to know.

OK, But Which language Should I Learn?

Surveys are interesting but don’t bet your career on them. If you take nothing else from this article, remember:
those who pick a language based on survey data or monetary prospects will  surely fail
There’s one secret for becoming a great developer:
just learn to build stuff! Be Creative, Be Innovative!
Finally, don’t expect to become a coding ninja overnight. I know it may hurt you :P But Some people have a natural aptitude but they also spent many, many hours purifying their skills and are continually learning new languages and techniques. Even the most junior roles presume several years of development experience.
At last ,we would like to say , choosing a language to learn for the sake of it is a boring academic exercise: only a few people succeed. It’s better to learn a language which helps you solve a real problem. Don’t worry if that technology is obsolete or outside the top ten — all languages are conceptually similar and your skills are also transferable.
Don’t worry about your choices: just build something new!
In the end we would like to thank Sitepoint.com for providing us an amazing data and complete analysis which will surely help our readers to choose the best language!