Github tops 40 million developers as Python, data science, machine learning popularity surges

Github has grown to more than 40 million developers and its growth is getting a big boost from data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning repositories.

In its annual Octoverse report, Github, owned by Microsoft, said it had more than 10 million new users, 44 million repositories created and 87 million pull requests in the last 12 months. The report is a good view of open source software and where the community is headed.

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In short, the open source community is following the data.

Among the key findings:

• Python topped Java as the second most popular language on GitHub based on repositories contributed. JavaScript remains No. 1.  Microsoft: We want you to learn Python programming language for free | Python programming language creator retires, saying: 'It's been an amazing ride' | Programming languages: How Instagram's taming a multimillion-line Python monster | Programming language popularity: Python tightens its grip at the top

• Nearly 80% of Github users are outside of the US.
• Lodash is the top open source package followed by expressjs.

• Repositories with data science focused topics such as deep learning, natural language processing and machine learning have surged in popularity.
• Jupyter Notebooks has seen growth of more than 100% year over year for the last three years.
• Natural language processing repositories are faring well. Star counts indicate natural language processing packages such as scipy, skikit-learn and TensorFlow have become popular. Non-code contributions such as academic papers have surged too.

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