Which Programming Languages Got the Most GitHub Stars in 2016?
GitHub has become the center of the open source software universe, with over 19 million users across the globe collaborating on more than 52 million repositories. One of the ways GitHub users express their appreciation for a particular repo is by "starring" it, which functions like a bookmark or upvote.
At the end of each year, examining which repositories and languages received the most new stars provides a fascinating look at the latest trends capturing the minds of software developers. 2016 was an exciting year that saw the continued rise of open source, with over 7.5 million new users joining GitHub and more than 25 million new repos created.
So which programming languages and projects earned the most stars from developers in 2016? Let‘s dive into the data and find out.
Most Starred Repositories by Language
First, here‘s a look at which individual repositories received the most stars in 2016, grouped by their primary programming language:
| Repository | Language | New Stars in 2016 |
|---|---|---|
| freeCodeCamp | JavaScript | 201,144 |
| vuejs/vue | JavaScript | 24,912 |
| facebook/yarn | JavaScript | 21,424 |
| tensorflow/models | Python | 15,826 |
| angular/angular | TypeScript | 14,430 |
| jwasham/google-interview-university | Python | 13,861 |
| django/django | Python | 13,217 |
| airbnb/javascript | JavaScript | 12,162 |
| facebook/react | JavaScript | 12,133 |
| robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh | Shell | 12,031 |
The clear standout is freeCodeCamp, the community that teaches people to code for free. Their open source repository of coding lessons and challenges attracted an astonishing 201,144 new stars in 2016, making it the #1 starred project on all of GitHub.
Other notable entries include Vue.js, the trendy new reactive JavaScript framework; Yarn, Facebook‘s JavaScript package manager; and Google‘s TensorFlow models for machine learning.
Overall, JavaScript dominated the list of most starred repositories, accounting for 50% of the top 50. This is not too surprising given JavaScript‘s prominence as the web‘s lingua franca and the language‘s increasing use on the backend via Node.js.
Python earned second place with popular repos like the TensorFlow models, core Django web framework, and coding interview prep guide. Python‘s explosive growth has been fueled largely by the rise of data science and machine learning applications.
Top Languages by Number of Stars
Now let‘s look at which languages overall received the most total stars on GitHub in 2016 across all of their repositories:
| Language | Total Stars Received in 2016 |
|---|---|
| JavaScript | 1,604,021 |
| Java | 626,302 |
| Python | 520,275 |
| PHP | 416,049 |
| C++ | 333,706 |
| HTML/CSS | 322,827 |
| Ruby | 289,246 |
| C | 272,443 |
| C# | 230,167 |
| Go | 189,617 |
Once again JavaScript is the runaway leader, with over 1.6 million stars collected in total for 2016. While JavaScript has long been a popular language, in recent years its ecosystem has absolutely exploded in terms of volume and variety of tools and frameworks.
As evidence of this, check out 2016‘s fastest growing new repos on GitHub:
| Repository | Stars Gained |
|---|---|
| vuejs/vue | 24,912 |
| facebook/yarn | 21,424 |
| zeit/hyper | 13,772 |
| facebookincubator/create-react-app | 12,241 |
Every single one is a JavaScript project! From frontend frameworks like React and Vue, to new twists on old tools like the Yarn package manager and Hyper terminal, JavaScript innovation is showing no signs of stopping.
In the rest of the top 10, Java remains popular for enterprise application development, while PHP and Ruby power many of the web‘s biggest websites and apps. However, Python made a strong push for the #3 spot in 2016 as its role in scientific computing, web development, and DevOps brings it into ever more domains.
The Incredible Growth of Web Development
If the most starred repos and languages of 2016 make one thing clear, it‘s that web development technologies are hotter than ever.
Source: Octoverse 2016
Along with JavaScript firmly cementing its place as the most popular language on GitHub, web stalwarts like HTML/CSS, Ruby, and PHP all rank in the top 10 most starred languages. What‘s more, web-oriented languages absolutely dominated the fastest growing new repos of the year.
The web development world is increasingly coalescing around a smaller number of massively popular tools and frameworks. Projects like React, Angular, and Vue are becoming the go-to solutions for frontend JavaScript development, while backend tools like Node, Express, and Meteor make JavaScript ever more viable as a full-stack option.
At the same time, new contenders are emerging to make web development faster and simpler, like the Golang web framework Gin or the static site generator Hugo. As a full-stack web developer myself, I‘m amazed at the speed of advancement I see every day in web tooling and excited to see what new projects emerge in 2017 to tackle the massive complexity of modern web development.
Data Science and Machine Learning Take Off
Another major trend of 2016 was the skyrocketing popularity of open source tools for data science, machine learning, and AI. As data becomes the lifeblood of more and more industries, programmers and scientists all over the world are hungry to try the latest advancements in extracting insights from data and creating intelligent prediction systems.
Just look at some of the most popular new repos specifically related to machine learning:
| Repository | Stars Gained |
|---|---|
| tensorflow/models | 15,826 |
| openai/gym | 8,947 |
| tensorflow/magenta | 7,994 |
| awslabs/chalice | 5,148 |
| tesseract-ocr/tesseract | 4,634 |
Google‘s TensorFlow library has become synonymous with the surge in neural networks and deep learning, with its pre-trained models offering an easy onramp to an otherwise dizzyingly complex field. Other projects like OpenAI‘s gym, a toolkit for training reinforcement learning models, and Magenta, for generating art and music with AI, show how the world‘s top researchers are making their latest work accessible to all.
On the language side, Python continues to dominate as the lingua franca of data science, drawing ever more programmers into its orbit. Python offers an amazing ecosystem of powerful libraries for data manipulation, statistical analysis, and machine learning, from sci-kit learn to NumPy, SciPy, pandas, and beyond. For machine learning in particular, Python is becoming the language of choice for everyone from academic researchers to industry practitioners alike.
Alternative languages for data science like Julia, R, and Scala are also gaining ground. Scala, which runs on the Java Virtual Machine, powers Spark and other tools in the Hadoop big data ecosystem, while R remains popular for statistics and data visualization. Up and comer Julia boasts performance as fast as C but keeps the ease of use of Python, making it well suited to heavy computational tasks.
Other Noteworthy Language Trends
What else can we learn from the programming language trends of 2016? Let‘s examine some of the other major storylines:
Swift on the Rise
Apple‘s Swift language, while still young, is growing fast for developing iOS, macOS, and server-side apps. Swift cracked the top 15 most starred languages in 2016 and saw a 262% increase in pull requests over 2015, the biggest jump of any major language. With its clean syntax and powerful modern features, Swift is primed to become the language of choice for app development if momentum continues.
Go Goes Mainstream
The Go language, developed by Google to be an easy-to-use systems language, is hitting the mainstream after years of steady growth. Eleven Go repositories ranked in the top 100 overall for 2016, and heavy hitters like Kubernetes and Docker are now built using Go. More and more developers are being won over by Go‘s simplicity, performance, and tooling for everything from web servers to command line apps.
Rust Gets Real
Rust, a systems language developed by Mozilla to prevent crashes and ensure thread safety, is proving itself in production and building a devoted following. Rust was the #1 most loved programming language in Stack Overflow‘s 2016 developer survey. Dropbox revealed it was able to reduce latency by 15-20% by rewriting performance-critical components in Rust. Expect to see even more interesting projects and use cases for Rust appear in 2017 and beyond.
TypeScript Tames JavaScript
Microsoft‘s TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript that adds static typing and other features, is exploding in popularity for large scale JavaScript projects. Angular 2, the rewrite of the massively popular web framework, was built entirely in TypeScript and is one of the top 10 most starred projects of 2016. TypeScript gives developers a more structured environment for catching bugs and maintaining sprawling JavaScript codebases.
Looking Ahead to 2017 and Beyond
2016 was another milestone year for open source software and the GitHub community. The new projects and trends that attracted the most stars and contributors give us a glimpse into where programming is headed in the future.
Web development remains at the forefront of programming innovation, with tools and frameworks that almost seem to be evolving too fast to keep up with. JavaScript and Node.js show no signs of slowing down their meteoric rise. At the same time, languages like Python and R are democratizing data science and machine learning to an ever wider audience.
While established languages like Java, PHP, and Ruby are still the backbone of many of the world‘s biggest and most important systems, newer contenders like Swift, Go, and Rust are starting to stake their claims at the cutting edge of development.
But beyond just the languages and frameworks, what inspires me most as a programmer is the incredible collaboration and openness embodied in the open source repositories that fill GitHub. Peeking at the "trending" repos each day, I never cease to be amazed by the creativity and generosity of this community, from epic releases by tech titans like Google and Facebook to ingenious passion projects by individual developers.
Following the ebb and flow of stars on GitHub is like watching the entire software development universe evolve before our eyes. I can‘t wait to see what incredible new stars emerge in 2017 to change the landscape yet again and move our craft forward. The sky is the limit when we code together.