AI helps Python jump over JavaScript on GitHub, report finds

Python has overtaken JavaScript as the most popular programming language on GitHub, according to the latest edition of GitHub’s annual Octoverse report—probably in large part due to a surge of interest in big data and AI.

According to GitHub, 2024 saw nearly double the number of generative AI projects (a 98% increase), with contributions to those projects rising 59% overall. Martin Woodward, VP of developer relations at GitHub, told IT Brew he believes AI “seems to be…helping more and more people actually call themselves developers.”

There are now over 518 million projects on GitHub, according to the Octoverse report, with over 5.2 billion contributions tracked throughout the year. While Python is used for innumerable purposes, it’s particularly useful for machine learning and big data projects, both of which are key parts of generative AI.

Throughout 2024, Woodward said, the lion’s share of AI development shifted from building machine learning tools like PyTorch and TensorFlow to projects using the resulting models.

“These GenAI-based tools are so much easier to use when they’re called as a service or as an external API,” he continued. “That’s why I think we’ve seen this massive spike in terms of [the] number of projects building on top of them, and the number of projects using them.”

Woodward also said that might explain some other findings in the report, such as rapid growth in the number of developers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For example, open-source projects have helped lower the cost of running AI inferences, which could make generative AI more affordable in those regions.

Woodward also suggested AI is helping those developers jump through language barriers, whether that means human language or programming ones. While he said it’s too early to directly attribute it to AI, he noted “the acceleration in those countries that are linguistically diverse has really stepped up a notch since these tools, like Copilot essentially, has been introduced.”

GitHub also observed a 92% increase in the usage of Jupyter Notebooks, an interactive software tool for developing data science projects. Woodward explained that while Jupyter Notebooks are “incredibly popular amongst the research community and across the data science community,” the findings indicate they’re increasingly using GitHub to share the underlying workings of their research.

The findings dovetail with a recent GitHub open-source survey that found growth in contributors identifying as minorities, Woodward pointed out.

“Obviously there are still blockers and restrictions for people in different markets, but we’re definitely seeing the energy and the passion in overcoming them,” Woodward added. “We’re seeing huge growth in India as well, where we’ve seen the government there has done a lot of work in terms of helping their next generation of people get into tech.”