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From the article:

  1 JavaScript
  2 Python
  3 Java
  4 PHP
  5 C#
  6 CSS
  7 C++
  7 TypeScript
  9 Ruby
  10 C
  11 Swift
  12 R
  12 Objective-C
  14 Shell
  15 Scala
  15 Go
  17 PowerShell
  17 Kotlin
  19 Rust
  19 Dart
That Scala is in their top 20 seems quite suspicious.

On the X-Y plot in the article, Rust's position at the far right is even more suspicious. (Are they counting all forks of the same repository as separate projects?) Swift appearing in the list north of Objective-C, likewise. Ruby is inexplicably high up -- above C?!? -- considering the absolute paucity of job listings for Ruby coders. And is there really anything at all coded in Powershell?

But at least it's not TIOBE, which would be to say entirely spurious, and insulting even to submit here.

> We exclude forked repos.

I can completely imagine there being more Swift questions than Objective C ones since it's now far more popular and Objective C seems like the languace has fewer constructs. I can never remember all the function/lambda declaration forms or weird things that happen with ad-hoc named tuples. Simlarly for C, I can't ever say I looked up anything in SO for it, Ruby I'm still googling for the difference between .x and .x! for arbitrary x.

Exactly. Those are not measures of use.
These rankings more closely match my expectations better than many other rankings/lists I've seen.

One thing I'd do is give a larger weighting to GitHub. StackOverflow doesn't really take down old questions and has been around a lot longer. GitHub likely more reflects current preferences and SO more historical ones.

On the GitHub axis, we can see that JavaScript, Python, Java, and TypeScript are all about the same. Ruby's not even far behind grouped with PHP, Go, C#, and C++.

What are the less popular languages on this list (or not on this list) that you actively (or immediately plan to) use and want to see succeed?

For moderately popular ones, I'll replace my usage of Go with Rust (and Java with Kotlin though I haven't used either much of late.) Dart is fine for non-AAA mobile.

My unpopular choices are F#/OCaml, Elixir, Elm (maybe), and for experimental use Pony and Zig.

Honest question. Do people consider css a programming language?
No.

But many, many web sites are in GitHub, and they have (mostly cribbed) CSS files in.

Nice to see PHP improve its ranking after years of slump and JS taking over majority of its share. probably not a surprise, There has been a lot of nice development since PHP8. PHP libraries are mostly stable when compared to Node making them easy to upgrade. I upgraded a 6 year old codebase from php7 to php8.1 and everything was completed within an hour. (used PHP-Rector)
Dart as well. It's nice to see the underdogs move up.
I always wonder whether or not a language having lot of questions on StackOverflow is a good thing…?
The ranking is accretive, as they say, which explains why it seems rather stable over time.

I would like to see how it would have become if they limited to the data collection (from GH and SO) to e.g. the last 2-3 years only.