New Programming Languages Keep Chipping Away at the Old

Developers are starting to make up their minds about which new programming languages they like best.

Several new languages have been introduced in recent years, including Google’s Go, Mozilla’s Rust, the scientific language Julia, and of course Apple’s Swift. These languages shook up the tech industry as new technologies like Go leapfrogged more established languages in popularity. Now that action may be slowing down, according to new data published by IT analysis firm RedMonk.

For the past five years RedMonk has tracked the popularity of different programming languages by charting the number of questions about each language asked on the popular programming question-and-answer site StackOverflow and the number of lines of code written in each language stored on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub. These metrics don’t tell us much about how widespread use of each language is in the commercial sector, nor how many jobs are available for developers conversant in particular language. But it does give us a way to ballpark the level of interest different technologies have garnered from developers themselves.