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While we generally try to have our rankings in July immediately after they are run, we generally operate these on a better late than never basis. On the assumption, then, that August is better than never, below are your RedMonk Q3 language rankings.
As always, these are a continuation of the work originally performed by Drew Conway and John Myles White late in 2010. While the specific means of collection has changed, the basic process remains the same: we extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
Our Current Process
The data source used for the GitHub portion of the analysis is the GitHub Archive. We query languages by pull request in a manner similar to the one GitHub used to assemble the State of the Octoverse. Our query is designed to be as comparable as possible to the previous process.
- Language is based on the base repository language. While this continues to have the caveats outlined below, it does have the benefit of cohesion with our previous methodology.
- We exclude forked repos.
- We use the aggregated history to determine ranking (though based on the table structure changes this can no longer be accomplished via a single query.)
For Stack Overflow, we simply collect the required metrics using their useful data explorer tool.
With that description out of the way, please keep in mind the other usual caveats.
