GitHub has released “Octoverse 2024,” revealing that Python is now the most popular programming language, and AI is boosting development, not ending careers.
JavaScript was the previous king of programming languages, used for everything from websites to applications to desktop environments. Despite its ubiquity, JavaScript’s reign has finally come to an end, with Python taking the top spot.
As GitHub points out, Python’s rise in popularity owes to its use in data science and machine learning.
In 2024, Python overtook JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub, while Jupyter Notebooks skyrocketed—both of which underscore the surge in data science and machine learning on GitHub. We’re also seeing increased interest in AI agents and smaller models that require less computational power, reflecting a shift across the industry as more people focus on new use cases for AI.
Interestingly, Python’s rise coincides with a general rise in developers.
Our data also shows a lot more people are joining the global developer community. In the past year, more developers joined GitHub and engaged with open source and public projects (in some cases, empowered by AI). And since tools like GitHub Copilot started going mainstream in early 2023, the number of developers on GitHub has rapidly grown with significant gains in the global south. While we see signals that AI is driving interest in software development, we can’t fully explain the surge in global growth our data reflects (but we’ll keep studying it).
GitHub goes on to highlight three major trends in the industry.
- A surge in global generative AI activity. AI is growing and evolving fast, and developers globally are going far beyond code generation with today’s tools and models. While the United States leads in contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub, we see more absolute activity outside the United States. In 2024, there was a 59% surge in the number of contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub and a 98% increase in the number of projects overall—and many of those contributions came from places like India, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.
- A rapidly growing number of developers worldwide—especially in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Notable growth is occurring in India, which is expected to have the world’s largest developer population on GitHub by 2028, as well as across Africa and Latin America. We also see Brazil’s developer community growing fast. Some of this is attributable to students. The GitHub Education program, for instance, has had more than 7 million verified participants. We’ve also seen 100% year-over-year growth among students, teachers, and open source maintainers adopting GitHub Copilot as part of our complimentary access program. This suggests AI isn’t just helping more people learn to write code or build software faster—it’s also attracting and helping more people become developers. First-time open source contributors continue to show wide-scale interest in AI projects. But we aren’t seeing signs that AI has hurt open source with low-quality contributions.
- Python is now the most used language on GitHub as global open source activity continues to extend beyond traditional software development. We saw Python emerge for the first time as the most used language on GitHub (more on that later). Python is used heavily across machine learning, data science, scientific computing, hobbyist, and home automation fields among others. The rise in Python usage correlates with large communities of people joining the open source community from across the STEM world rather than the traditional community of software developers. This year, we also saw a 92% spike in usage across Jupyter Notebooks. This could indicate people in data science, AI, machine learning, and academia increasingly use GitHub. Systems programming languages, like Rust, are also on the rise, even as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java remain the most widely used languages on GitHub.
GitHub’s findings are a significant data point in an industry that is in the process of evolving, thanks to AI’s impact. Many developers and industry veterans have been worried that AI would replace programmers, leading to mass firings. Already, companies are relying heavily on AI to help write code.
GitHub’s Findings Echo Statements From Industry Leaders
For example, in a recent quarterly report, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said more than 25% of all Google code has been written by AI. Similarly, Google co-founder Sergey Brin highlighted just how much AI has impacted his development habits.
“I think that AI touches so many different elements of day-to-day life, and sure, search is one of them,” Brin said in an interview with All-In Podcast’s David Friedberg. “But it kind of covers everything. For example, programming itself, the way that I think about it is very different now.
“Writing code from scratch feels really hard, compared to just asking the AI to do it,” Brin added, to laughter from the audience. “I’ve written a little bit of code myself, just for kicks, just for fun. And then sometimes I’ve had the AI write the code for me, which was fun.”
Brin’s experience seems to support GitHub’s findings, that AI is enhancing development and likely leading to a surge in developer engagement.
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