Microsoft’s TypeScript Breaks Into RedMonk’s Top 10 Programming Language List

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RedMonk’s Top 10 Programming Language List Features TypeScript For The First Time

In a quarterly ranking of programming languages conducted by developer analyst firm, RedMonk this week revealed that Microsoft’s TypeScript has finally broken into the list of top 10 programming languages. Although the results were published this week (in July), the RedMonk report contains data compiled for June 2019.

For those unaware, RedMonk’s rankings are based on pull requests in GitHub, as well as an estimated count of how many times a language is tagged on developer knowledge-sharing site, Stack Overflow. They extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction.

“The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends,” RedMonk said.

The popularity of JavaScript has, in turn, made Typescript a more popular coding language, combined with the optional safety offered by TypeScript, wrote Stephen O’Grady, RedMonk industry analyst.

TypeScript made its first appearance on the RedMonk list in 26th position three years ago, and then jumped to 17th spot a year ago. It then moved to 12th place in RedMonk’s March rankings this year followed by 10th position in June 2019 rankings.

This also marks the second time a different programming language has broken into RedMonk’s ranking of most popular programming languages in five years. The first time it happened was in 2018 when Swift moved to the 10th position. Currently, it is in 11th position as of June 2019.

“The ubiquity of JavaScript coupled with the optional safety offered by TypeScript has proven to be a winning combination, and vaulted it directly into rare territory,” says O’Grady.

“It will be interesting to see if it can sustain this rank, or if like Swift before it, this is a temporary gain. Either way, TypeScript is a language that many are betting on moving forward.”

According to the data, the rest of the top 10 remained fairly static, with the exception of C++ joining C# at the 5th spot.

Given below are the 10 most popular programming languages as of June 2019, according to RedMonk:

  1. JavaScript
    2. Java
    3. Python
    4. PHP
    5. C++ (tie)
    5. C# (tie)
    7. CSS
    8. Ruby
    9. C
    10. TypeScript

The remaining languages that follow the top 10 are Swift, Objective-C, Scala, Shell, R, Go, PowerShell, Perl, Haskell, and Kotlin.

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