The Most Popular Programming Languages in 2026: JavaScript Leads, TypeScript Hits No. 3, and PowerShell Nearly Tripled
The most popular programming languages in 2026 are JavaScript, Python and TypeScript, by the count of developers pushing code on GitHub. In Q2 2026, 6,162,445 developers pushed to repositories containing JavaScript, 4,509,915 to Python and 3,025,534 to TypeScript. PowerShell nearly tripled: developers pushing it rose 187% in a year, and it climbed from 15th to 8th worldwide since 2020.
We downloaded the GitHub Innovation Graph, which counts, for every economy and quarter, the unique developers who pushed code to a repository containing each language, and ranked 347 programming languages worldwide and in the United States from Q1 2020 to Q2 2026. We then tabulated the Stack Overflow Developer Survey public microdata for 2024, 2025 and 2026 to see what developers say they use, admire and want to learn, split by professionals, students and IT operations roles. GitHub measures activity; the survey measures self-reported use. Where they agree, the answer is solid.
The top programming languages worldwide, Q2 2026
JavaScript ranks first and Python second, as they have in every quarter since 2020. Behind them the order has moved. TypeScript passed Shell, Java, Ruby, C++, PHP and C to reach 3rd. PowerShell climbed from 15th to 8th, Rust from 30th to 16th, and PLpgSQL, PostgreSQL’s procedural language, from 34th to 12th. Ruby fell from 5th to 14th. Ranks compare the second quarter of each year so that seasonal swings do not distort them: Java, for example, has lost developers between the second and third quarter in every year of the data.
TypeScriptPowerShellPLpgSQLRustJavaScript and Pythonothers
Rank by unique developers who pushed to a repository containing the language, summed across 182 economies, second quarter of each year. Build and config formats (Dockerfile, Makefile, CMake, Batchfile, Procfile) and markup (HTML, CSS, notebooks) excluded. Source: GitHub Innovation Graph (CC0 1.0), our analysis.
| Language | World rank Q2 2026 | Developers pushing | Rank Q2 2025 | Rank Q2 2020 | 1-year change | US rank | US developers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript | 1 | 6,162,445 | 1 | 1 | +64% | 1 | 831,629 |
| Python | 2 | 4,509,915 | 2 | 2 | +75% | 2 | 746,215 |
| TypeScript | 3 | 3,025,534 | 3 | 9 | +109% | 4 | 447,003 |
| Shell | 4 | 2,353,843 | 4 | 3 | +79% | 3 | 499,968 |
| Java | 5 | 1,062,585 | 5 | 4 | +20% | 8 | 112,858 |
| C++ | 6 | 930,908 | 6 | 6 | +34% | 5 | 153,701 |
| C | 7 | 874,642 | 7 | 8 | +31% | 6 | 149,045 |
| PowerShell | 8 | 668,825 | 14 | 15 | +187% | 7 | 122,713 |
| PHP | 9 | 547,998 | 8 | 7 | +15% | 17 | 38,424 |
| C# | 10 | 525,956 | 9 | 10 | +22% | 12 | 73,428 |
| Kotlin | 11 | 463,932 | 10 | 14 | +55% | 16 | 44,233 |
| PLpgSQL | 12 | 420,979 | 26 | 34 | +393% | 14 | 63,622 |
| Swift | 13 | 395,788 | 13 | 16 | +68% | 13 | 64,899 |
| Ruby | 14 | 378,267 | 11 | 5 | +28% | 9 | 95,862 |
| Go | 15 | 369,814 | 12 | 13 | +53% | 11 | 79,483 |
| Rust | 16 | 332,146 | 17 | 30 | +112% | 10 | 80,472 |
| Objective-C | 17 | 283,704 | 15 | 12 | +34% | 20 | 34,871 |
| Dart | 18 | 235,583 | 18 | 22 | +50% | 31 | 14,847 |
| Lua | 19 | 219,502 | 16 | 23 | +34% | 15 | 49,862 |
| HCL | 20 | 155,062 | 22 | 37 | +59% | 21 | 34,008 |
| Assembly | 21 | 153,572 | 19 | 20 | +32% | 22 | 33,023 |
| Nix | 22 | 151,792 | 24 | 68 | +65% | 18 | 37,430 |
| Mako | 23 | 136,602 | 35 | 56 | +181% | 25 | 20,975 |
| Perl | 24 | 116,422 | 21 | 17 | +19% | 23 | 29,181 |
| Hack | 25 | 114,811 | 20 | 19 | +1% | 51 | 6,645 |
Top 25 programming languages worldwide in Q2 2026. A developer who pushes to repositories in several languages counts once for each language. Source: GitHub Innovation Graph (CC0 1.0), our analysis.
Every language grew, but not equally
Raw counts rose for almost every language, and GitHub activity as a whole surged: total git pushes in the economies GitHub reports rose 95% between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, to 408 million, and developer accounts reached 209 million. The useful signal is relative growth. Against a median of +51% for the 26 languages with at least 100,000 developers pushing, PLpgSQL (+393%), PowerShell (+187%), Mako, a Python template format (+181%), Rust (+112%) and TypeScript (+109%) pulled ahead, while Java (+20%) and C# (+22%) trailed.
Change in unique developers pushing, worldwide, Q2 2025 to Q2 2026, languages with at least 100,000 in Q2 2026. Dashed line: median. Source: GitHub Innovation Graph (CC0 1.0), our analysis.
The surge lines up with the arrival of AI coding agents. In the Innovation Graph’s repository-topics file, developers pushing to repositories tagged ai-agents went from 542 in Q2 2025 to 24,939 in Q2 2026, and claude-code, not reported in any economy a year earlier, reached 24,141. Topics are optional tags, so these counts are a floor, and the data cannot show which pushes an agent wrote. It can show the breadth of the PowerShell rise: PowerShell grew faster than JavaScript in 20 of the 20 largest developer economies, from +77% in Russia to +450% in China. For PLpgSQL, Postgres-backed starter stacks are the obvious suspect; the supabase topic grew from 663 to 4,782 pushers, but the data cannot link the two directly.
Language leaders by country
JavaScript is the top programming language in 178 of the 182 economies in the Q2 2026 data. Python leads in 4: China, Hong Kong, Russia, Sierra Leone. The table ranks each language inside the 20 economies with the most GitHub developer accounts. Python is second in 16 of the 20 and first in China, Russia and Hong Kong; in the Philippines TypeScript edges it for second. The differences are lower down. PHP ranks 4th in Indonesia and 4th in the Philippines but 17th in the US. C# is 5th in Turkey and 6th in Vietnam. PowerShell makes the top 8 in 11 of the 20, including the US, Japan, the UK, Germany and Australia.
| Economy | Developer accounts | JavaScript | Python | TypeScript | Shell | Java | C++ | C# | PHP | Go | Rust | Kotlin | PowerShell |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 35.1M | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 8 | 5 | 12 | 17 | 11 | 10 | 16 | 7 |
| India | 29.0M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 15 | 11 | 16 | 20 | 9 | 8 |
| China | 11.8M | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 12 | 19 | 11 | 9 | 10 | 8 |
| Brazil | 9.1M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 10 | 9 | 15 | 18 | 12 | 11 |
| Japan | 6.2M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 12 | 15 | 10 | 9 | 14 | 7 |
| United Kingdom | 6.0M | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 9 | 14 | 12 | 11 | 18 | 8 |
| Indonesia | 5.8M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 9 | 6 | 17 | 4 | 14 | 19 | 7 | 16 |
| Germany | 5.7M | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 12 | 13 | 9 | 10 | 14 | 8 |
| Russia | 4.9M | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 12 | 9 | 15 | 11 | 10 |
| France | 4.4M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 10 | 8 | 14 | 11 | 15 | 9 |
| Canada | 4.3M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 5 | 9 | 15 | 12 | 11 | 17 | 8 |
| Hong Kong | 3.7M | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 8 | 5 | 14 | 22 | 9 | 10 | 12 | 7 |
| South Korea | 3.5M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 10 | 24 | 17 | 14 | 9 | 8 |
| Vietnam | 3.2M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 6 | 10 | 17 | 19 | 11 | 8 |
| Mexico | 3.1M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 10 | 6 | 19 | 18 | 9 | 11 |
| Philippines | 3.1M | 1 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 9 | 4 | 20 | 19 | 8 | 12 |
| Spain | 3.1M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 10 | 8 | 15 | 16 | 11 | 9 |
| Pakistan | 2.8M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 9 | 5 | 15 | 8 | 20 | 22 | 7 | 11 |
| Turkey | 2.7M | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 14 | 17 | 18 | 9 | 11 |
| Australia | 2.6M | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 9 | 6 | 8 | 16 | 12 | 11 | 17 | 7 |
Rank within each economy, Q2 2026:12 to 34 to 67 to 1011 to 2021+
Economies ordered by GitHub developer accounts in Q2 2026. Programming languages only, build files excluded. Source: GitHub Innovation Graph (CC0 1.0), our analysis.
In the United States, Python is closer to the top than it is worldwide: 746,215 developers pushed Python in Q2 2026, 90% of JavaScript’s count (up from 75% in Q2 2020). Shell ranks 3rd in the US, PowerShell 7th, Java 8th and C# 12th. The Innovation Graph sees only public activity, and the survey orders company languages differently: 27.7% of professional developers used Java and 28.4% used C#, more than used PowerShell (24.3%), the reverse of the US GitHub order.
What developers say: Stack Overflow 2026
The 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey asked 30,903 people about their tools; 14,099 answered the language question. The top four are close: JavaScript 62.0%, SQL 58.4%, HTML/CSS 58.2% and Python 58.0%. Bash and other shells (51.3%, 5th) and PowerShell (24.6%, 9th) both make the top 10. JavaScript use fell 4.3 points from 2025 and HTML/CSS 4.0, but the 2026 sample is smaller (14,099 language answers against 31,671) and its mix of participants changes every year, so small moves are not trends.
Professional developers (11,227)Students (1,352)
Share who did extensive work in each language in the past year, top 15 languages by use among everyone who answered. Professionals: people who create code as a primary part of their job. Students: employment status Student. Contains information from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey (Stack Exchange Inc.), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.
Students are a Python and systems crowd: 74.3% used Python, 49.9% C and 47.9% C++, against 56.8%, 21.0% and 24.0% of professionals. Professionals lean on SQL (61.2%) and TypeScript (47.6%). Rust is the most admired language again, as it was in the 2024 and 2025 data: 67.4% of its users want to keep using it, ahead of TypeScript (53.0%) and SQL (51.4%) among languages with at least 1,000 users. Python is the most desired, named by 33.4% as a language they want to work with next year.
| Language | All 2026 | Change vs 2025 (pts) | Professionals | Students | US | Admired | Desired |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript | 62.0% | -4.3 | 64.1% | 58.8% | 65.5% | 42.0% | 27.8% |
| SQL | 58.4% | -0.4 | 61.2% | 43.5% | 59.2% | 51.4% | 32.0% |
| HTML/CSS | 58.2% | -4.0 | 59.3% | 64.2% | 60.6% | 47.8% | 28.9% |
| Python | 58.0% | -0.1 | 56.8% | 74.3% | 62.3% | 50.6% | 33.4% |
| Bash/Shell | 51.3% | +2.3 | 51.8% | 52.2% | 56.6% | 48.1% | 25.8% |
| TypeScript | 43.8% | 0.0 | 47.6% | 33.3% | 44.1% | 53.0% | 27.5% |
| Java | 27.5% | -2.0 | 27.7% | 39.0% | 26.3% | 38.5% | 13.1% |
| C# | 27.1% | -0.9 | 28.4% | 22.9% | 29.4% | 50.1% | 16.5% |
| PowerShell | 24.6% | +1.4 | 24.3% | 21.7% | 28.7% | 31.5% | 8.7% |
| C++ | 24.3% | +0.7 | 24.0% | 47.9% | 25.9% | 45.8% | 15.8% |
| C | 21.8% | -0.3 | 21.0% | 49.9% | 22.8% | 45.9% | 14.2% |
| Rust | 18.0% | +3.1 | 18.5% | 30.8% | 19.6% | 67.4% | 26.3% |
| PHP | 17.7% | -1.3 | 17.5% | 14.6% | 13.0% | 35.7% | 7.6% |
| Go | 16.5% | 0.0 | 17.1% | 15.2% | 18.1% | 49.5% | 17.7% |
| Kotlin | 10.8% | 0.0 | 11.4% | 13.2% | 8.3% | 43.1% | 9.4% |
| Lua | 9.4% | +0.2 | 9.1% | 19.5% | 10.0% | 40.8% | 6.4% |
| Assembly | 7.2% | +0.1 | 6.9% | 19.3% | 7.7% | 48.4% | 6.8% |
| Swift | 5.9% | +0.4 | 6.0% | 4.7% | 7.6% | 48.2% | 5.2% |
| Ruby | 5.8% | -0.6 | 6.1% | 2.9% | 8.8% | 42.4% | 4.1% |
| Dart | 4.9% | -1.0 | 5.2% | 5.8% | 2.9% | 42.2% | 4.0% |
Used: did extensive development work in the language in the past year. Admired: share of past-year users who want to keep using it. Desired: share of everyone who answered who want to work with it next year. The 2026 question added a row on AI-assisted use, so 2025 comparisons are indicative. Contains information from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey (Stack Exchange Inc.), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.
What this means for MSPs
The languages that run IT operations rank high in both datasets. Shell is 4th on GitHub worldwide and PowerShell 8th, and in the 2026 survey system administrators report far more scripting than developers do:
| Group (Stack Overflow 2026) | PowerShell | Bash/Shell | Python | SQL | Go |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| System administrators n=147 | 43.5% | 72.8% | 64.6% | 63.9% | 17.7% |
| DevOps engineers n=293 | 32.4% | 79.9% | 77.1% | 55.3% | 38.2% |
| All IT operations roles n=767 | 33.5% | 74.3% | 75.0% | 58.5% | 35.7% |
| Professional developers n=11,227 | 24.3% | 51.8% | 56.8% | 61.2% | 17.1% |
| Everyone who answered n=14,099 | 24.6% | 51.3% | 58.0% | 58.4% | 16.5% |
IT operations roles: system administrator, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, site reliability, support engineer and cybersecurity. Group sizes are people who answered the language question; the role groups are small, so treat differences of a few points as noise. Contains information from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey (Stack Exchange Inc.), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.
- Hire for Bash and Python, then PowerShell. 73% of sysadmins and 80% of DevOps engineers used a shell, and 75% of all people in IT operations roles used Python. PowerShell (44% of sysadmins) is the third skill: the standard tool for Microsoft 365, Entra ID and Intune administration, but not a substitute for the other two.
- Expect PowerShell in more places than your RMM. PowerShell’s 187% jump on GitHub means more public scripts and modules that technicians will find and copy. Require code review and signing for scripts that reach client endpoints, the same discipline that applies to the package ecosystem behind malicious npm packages.
- Price the skill, not the title. Python and SQL are used by a majority of both professional developers (57% and 61%) and IT operations staff (75% and 59%), so an automation hire with both overlaps heavily with a developer. Our software engineer salary data shows what that overlap costs by metro.
- Do not size shell skills by desktop share. Shell outranks PowerShell on GitHub and in the survey, even though Linux’s share of desktops is small. Desktop share is the wrong guide to which scripting skills an automation hire needs.
One caution: the counts in this report depend on GitHub being up and indexed, and GitHub outages have become more frequent in 2026. Keep automation repositories mirrored or backed up outside a single platform.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most popular programming language in 2026?
JavaScript. In Q2 2026, 6,162,445 developers pushed code to GitHub repositories containing JavaScript, more than any other programming language, and it ranked first in 178 of the 182 economies GitHub reports. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026, 62.0% of people who answered said they had done extensive work in JavaScript in the past year.
Is Python more popular than JavaScript?
Not on GitHub as a whole: Python had 4,509,915 developers pushing in Q2 2026, 73% of JavaScript’s count, up from 59% in Q2 2020. Python ranks first in 4 economies, including China, Russia and Hong Kong, and it is the top language among students in the 2026 Stack Overflow survey (74.3%).
Is TypeScript the most used language on GitHub?
It depends on how you count. GitHub’s Octoverse 2025 ranked TypeScript first in August 2025 by monthly contributors, counting each repository under its single primary language. The Innovation Graph counts every language present in a repository, and on that measure TypeScript ranks 3rd worldwide in Q2 2026 with 3,025,534 developers pushing, up from 9th in Q2 2020.
What is the most admired programming language?
Rust. In the 2026 Stack Overflow survey, 67.4% of developers who used Rust in the past year want to keep using it, the highest share among languages with at least 1,000 users. Python is the most desired language: 33.4% of people who answered want to work with it next year.
Which programming languages are growing fastest?
Among languages with at least 100,000 developers pushing, PLpgSQL (+393%), PowerShell (+187%), Mako (+181%) and Rust (+112%) grew fastest on GitHub between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026. Nearly every language grew in raw terms: total git pushes rose 95% over the same year.
Which scripting language should IT and MSP staff learn?
Bash and Python first, PowerShell for Windows estates. Among system administrators in the 2026 Stack Overflow survey, 72.8% used Bash or another shell, 64.6% Python and 43.5% PowerShell, against 24.6% PowerShell use among everyone who answered.
Methodology
GitHub source. GitHub Innovation Graph, data/languages.csv, developers.csv, git_pushes.csv and topics.csv, downloaded from the github/innovationgraph repository in October 2026 and released under CC0 1.0. The language metric is the number of unique developers in each economy who made at least one git push to a repository containing a given language in the quarter, using GitHub’s Linguist detection. Coverage runs from Q1 2020 to Q2 2026.
Our processing. We summed economy counts to get world totals, after removing the EU row (an aggregate of member states that would double-count). We kept languages GitHub types as “programming” and dropped five build and config formats (Dockerfile, Makefile, CMake, Batchfile, Procfile); HTML, CSS and Jupyter Notebook are typed as markup and are excluded from ranks but present in the CSV. Ranks compare the same quarter of each year to avoid seasonal swings. The economy code “NA” (Namibia) is kept rather than read as missing.
GitHub limitations. Only public activity is counted. Economies or languages with fewer than 100 developers in a quarter are suppressed, so world totals slightly under-count small languages, and the number of reported economies rose from 133 to 182 over the period. A developer counts once per language, so multi-language repositories lift every language they contain. GitHub excludes accounts with activity volumes beyond plausible human use and accounts flagged as inauthentic.
Survey source. Stack Overflow Developer Survey public results files for 2024, 2025 and 2026 (one row per participant), downloaded from the StackExchange/Survey repository in October 2026. Shares use as the base everyone who answered at least one row of the language question; this reproduces Stack Overflow’s published 2026 base of 14,099 and its language counts to within 8 responses (JavaScript and SQL exactly: 8,742 and 8,237). Stack Overflow’s published 2025 figures use a base of 31,771 against our 31,671, so our 2025 shares differ from its charts by up to 0.3 points. The survey is a self-selected sample of Stack Overflow users, not a random sample of all developers. Survey figures are cited on this page and kept out of the download because the data is licensed under the ODbL. Contains information from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey (Stack Exchange Inc.), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.
Not used. We did not use TIOBE or PYPL index values, which many ranking pages quote; their methods count search results rather than code or developers.
Not advice. This is an analysis of public developer data, not hiring or career advice for any individual.
Cite as:The Uptime Report. "The Most Popular Programming Languages in 2026: JavaScript Leads, TypeScript Hits No. 3, and PowerShell Nearly Tripled." October 2026. https://theuptimereport.com/most-popular-programming-languages/
References
- GitHub, Innovation Graph data repository (languages, developers, git pushes, topics), CC0 1.0. Accessed October 2026.
- GitHub, Innovation Graph datasheet. Accessed October 2026.
- GitHub Innovation Graph, Programming languages (rank definition: unique developers who uploaded code to a repository containing the language). Accessed October 2026.
- Stack Overflow, Developer Survey results and data downloads. Accessed October 2026.
- Stack Overflow, 2026 Developer Survey, Technology results. Accessed October 2026.
- StackExchange/Survey repository, public results archive and licence notice (ODbL 1.0). Accessed October 2026.
- GitHub, Octoverse 2025: TypeScript becomes the most used language on GitHub. Accessed October 2026.
- GitHub Docs, About repository languages. Accessed October 2026.
Leave a Reply