The Most Popular Programming Languages of GitHub's Trending Repositories

Abstract: GitHub is one of the most popular hosting sites for software development, version control and code collaboration, often being used in open source development. The website has a trending page showing the current most popular projects, where popularity mostly is determined by the amount of users that have starred a given repository. This thesis aims to investigate the trends of the most used programming languages of these trending repositories, during a five year period from 2015 to 2020. This is done by scraping a daily newsletter containing the trending repositories, analyzing the data and comparing our results to other research on popular programming languages. Our results somewhat correlate with the results of other studies on popular programming languages. Languages such as Java, Python, JavaScript and C++ are represented in the top of both our results and the results of other studies. JavaScript is by far the most popular programming language in our results. The languages that made it to the top of our results, but are not represented in other studies, are mostly languages related to web development, such as HTML, CSS, and TypeScript. This might suggest that web development projects are more likely to become popular on GitHub. An interesting outcome of our results is that almost a fifth of the trending repositories did not contain any code. A random sample of these repositories was obtained and manually examined. This showed that these repositories are mostly educational computer science resources, or other resources related to computer science and technology, which corresponds with GitHub’s user base of software developers.