Scala advances to No. 12 on the RedMonk list of popular programming languages

In December of 2010, Drew Conway decided to explore in quantitative fashion one of the more popular and contentious subjects debated by developers: the relative popularity of programming languages. To do this, he compared the traction of the languages on both GitHub and StackOverflow, communities that are both popular with developers and yet have somewhat distinct communities. GitHub’s rankings are based on GitHub’s own stacking of the individual languages, while the languages on StackOverflow are ranked according to the volume of tags associated with each language.

The result was a plot that featured a high correlation; the popularity on GitHub tended to correlate with the popularity on StackOverflow. Ten months later, we repeated this analysis, and again in February. These analyses have proven very popular with developers; the latter post was linked to on Twitter nearly six hundred times.

But because this plot can be difficult to decipher by itself, we’ve extracted a list of the Top 20 programming languages by popularity here.

1. JavaScript
2. Java
3. PHP
4. Python
5. Ruby
6. C#
7. C++
8. C
9. Objective-C
10. Shell
11. Perl
12. Scala
13. Haskell
14. ASP
15. Assembly
16. ActionScript
17. R
18. Visual Basic
19. CoffeeScript
20. Groovy