Recently we took a look at the popularity of programming languages used on GitHub.com.
Below is a graph that shows the change in rank of languages since GitHub launched in 2008.
The rank represents languages used in public & private repositories, excluding forks, as detected by Linguist.
It should be noted that this graph represents each language's relative popularity on GitHub. For example, Ruby on Rails has been on GitHub since 2008, which may explain Ruby's early popularity.
Between 2008 and 2015 GitHub gained the most traction in the Java community, which changed in rank from 7th to 2nd. Possible contributing factors to this growth could be the growing popularity of Android and the increasing demand for version control platforms at businesses and enterprises.