The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings aim to gain insights into potential language adoption trends by tracking the code usage and number of discussions of programming languages on GitHub and Stack Overflow, and ranking them after statistical analysis. Therefore, among many programming language lists, the RedMonk programming language rankings can be regarded as the ceiling in the industry in terms of professionalism and recognition.
The data collection method for the RedMonk list consists of two parts:
-Use GitHub Archive as the data source to analyze GitHub data;
-Stack Overflow Some directly use the utility tool data explorer provided by it. For the specific sorting algorithm, see the official introduction.
The list is published twice a year, with the last update in May (RedMonk Ranking: Objective-C is on the decline). Traditionally, the 2nd update is in November, but until now there has been no movement.
Yesterday, the officialexplained why it has not released a new programming language list for a long time - the reason is that they obtain data in the same way as in the past It was later discovered that the amount of data collected was significantly different from previous years.
Since the release of ChatGPT, various AI code assistants have become popular, so the overall number of questions in the Q&A community has dropped significantly. In GitHub, according to GitHub Archive data, the PR volume in January 2023 dropped by about 25% compared with the PR in February 2022, which was completely unexpected.
RedMonk stated that although it had been aware of the significant decline in Stack Overflow traffic (Stack Overflow traffic dropped significantly), it did not expect it There will be such major "anomalies" in the data on GitHub.
So RedMonk points out that the emergence and rise of AI-based code assistants has impacted the data in RedMonk’s language rankings. As questions and knowledge sharing move from public forums to private tools, their ability to identify meaningful trends from public data will change indefinitely.
RedMonk said it will continue to track these trendsand determine how changes in sample size will affect their rankings, while previewing January 2024 Publish new list.