GitHub report: Python overtakes JavaScript, while TypeScript beats Java

More and more GitHub members are using Python. Octoverse – the large annual statistical analysis by GitHub – shows that Python overtook JavaScript as the most used language for the first time in 2024. It is immediately followed by TypeScript, which overtakes Java. The authors of the study see artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science in particular as drivers for Python. Jupyter Notebook, which is popular with data scientists, also recorded a strong increase (up 92% on the previous year). Python also plays an important role in the field of home automation.

Python is growing faster than JavaScript, but not faster than JavaScript and TypeScript combined. This suggests that more developers are switching from JavaScript to TypeScript. Rust, Dockerfiles and the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) are also on the rise.

The Octoverse study measures the complete activity (contributions) around a repository, i.e. pushes, pulls, reviews, issues and discussions. JavaScript continues to lead in terms of pure commits, as can be seen in GitHub's Innovation Graph (up to the first quarter of 24). JavaScript is also ahead of Python and Java in terms of new repos created in the last year.

More development despite or because of AI

The number of GenAI projects doubled in 2024 with an increase of 98 percent between October 2023 and October 2024, while contributions rose by 59 percent. AI has therefore not led to a slump in the activities of developers. On the contrary, AI is proving to be a driver. "Do you remember people saying that AI would replace developers? Our data tells a different story," the report states. And: "Our data shows that a large number of people are joining the global developer community."

However, the report qualifies: "We see evidence that AI is driving interest in software development, but we cannot fully explain the global growth that our data reflects (but we are investigating further)."

More and more developers are incorporating AI models into their applications or getting involved in AI projects. There is a trend towards AI agents and small models that require fewer resources, which is particularly interesting for smartphones and embedded devices. GitHub expects further growth as a result. The top 3 GenAI projects are: Stable Diffusion WebUI, AutoGPT, Ollama and the top regions working on GenAI include the US, Hong Kong, India, Germany and the Netherlands.

The report also states: "We see no evidence that AI is harming open source through poor quality contributions."

Strong growth in the global South

Octoverse counted 5.2 billion contributions in 2024, 1 billion of which were in open source and public projects. The vast majority of repos are private. There are 518 million projects in total, 181 million of which are private. 137,000 are public GenAI projects. The USA is number 1 in terms of the number of developers, but the growth is taking place elsewhere. In India, the developer community grew by 28 percent in 2024 and GitHub expects it to overtake the US in 2028. The authors explain this strong increase with the National Education Policy from 2020, which obliges schools to teach programming and AI.

Brazil (27%), the Philippines (29%), Kenya (33%) and Nigeria (28%) are also growing strongly. In Germany, 21% of new GitHub members joined in 2024, putting it in 7th place in terms of the size of the developer community and 3rd place in terms of contributions to open source projects.

As an anecdote, the report reports that the largest increase was in Antarctica with 379 percent: from 19 to 91 developers.

There was also a 100 percent increase in the free use of Copilot in the education and open source sector.

The Octoverse report provides many more insights, for example the top 3 projects are: Home Assistant, VS Code and the Leo programming language; the top vulnerabilities: Injection, Broken Access Control and Insecure Design.

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