AI push makes Python the most popular language on GitHub

For the first time in GitHub history, Python has overtaken JavaScript as the most popular programming language on the platform, with coders using the increasingly common language for AI development.

The platform’s annual Octoverse report revealed Python’s popularity appears largely due to huge demand for artificial intelligence, but it’s also used in data science for open source projects.

According to the stats, contributions to generative AI projects alone saw a 59% rise, with contributions to AI-related public projects nearly doubling compared with 2023. India, Germany, Japan and Singapore accounted for most of these, says the platform.

Python is now GitHub’s most popular language

Moreover, GitHub noted the surge in developers joining and using the platform from all over the world: “...many of these developers are contributing to open source projects for the first time.”

Two years after the public preview launch of ChatGPT and the subsequent AI boom, the company says companies and developers alike are turning their attentions to AI agents and smaller models that require less compute and promise more custom applications.

The demand for Python is also evidenced in the 92% increase in the use of Jupyter Notebooks, a project designed to support the development of open source software.

According to the report, the growth of Python to become the platform’s number one language is indicative of the shift in userbase, from traditional software programmers to a wider range of STEM use cases.

Python, JavaScript, TypeScript and Java remain the most common languages on GitHub, but systems programming languages like Rust are also on the up.

Looking ahead, GitHub anticipates that India will have the world’s largest developer population on GitHub by 2028, with Africa and Latin America countries, such as Brazil, also set to undergo significant growth.

The launch of the report coincides with the company’s annual Universe event, which it used to announce the availability of even more models. GitHub Copilot, initially launched with GPT-3-based Codex, has been largely OpenAI-reliant up until now.

Later updates to Copilot Chat have seen the introduction of GPT-3.5, GPT 3.5-turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4o and 4o-mini models to cater to different latency and quality requirements, but now the company is promising new model options from other providers.

Copilot Chat has now launched with OpenAI o1-preview and o1-mini models, but Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet is set to roll out over the next week, with Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro coming in the coming weeks.

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