🐍 The Languages That Power GitHub

Which languages are rising, which are fading, and what’s driving the change on GitHub

Every year, millions of developers push code to GitHub, and with each commit, developers around the world leave behind clues about which stories or problems they are trying to tell or fix. Using data from GitHub I compared push activity from 2020-2024 to see how the programming language landscape is shifting.

Note: This chart only includes programming languages. Markup, prose, and data formats were excluded, although GitHub’s paper considered Docker and Makefile ‘programming languages’.

Additionally, I prepared a table for easier understanding of the number of Git Pushes per language:

Usually, Substack lets me embed a table from Datawrapper, but at the time of this post this functionality was not working. 😕

Quick Takeaways

• 🕸️ JavaScript still rules the web. It remains the most-pushed language on GitHub by a wide margin, showing that web development hasn’t slowed down.

• 🐍 Python keeps climbing the charts. Its share of GitHub activity nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, likely fueled by its popularity in AI, data analysis, and data science.

• 🍵⚰️ Java and PHP are slowly fading. Once pillars of development, both languages have seen a steady decline in relative usage on GitHub over the past few years with only a 21% and 25% increase respectively

• 🐳 Dockerfile and Makefile growth highlight the rise of infrastructure as code. While not traditional programming languages, both have seen strong usage increases, reflecting how containerization, DevOps, and build automations are now essential parts of modern development workflows.

Push activity helps us understand what developers are truly building today, from web apps powered by JavaScript to AI-driven projects fueling Python’s rise, alongside infrastructure managed with tools like Dockerfile and Makefile.

As 2025 unfolds, AI-assisted coding is transforming how we build software, but the programming languages we know remain central. The big question is will this new era accelerate the rise of Python to the top?

💬 What do you think?
Are you surprised by any of the trends? Which language do you use most often? Is there a language you’re currently learning?

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Thanks for reading! ✌️