I looked at bit at the github activity for various languages in terms of repos created in the past 2 months using Github advanced search.

My interpretation:

Languages that are used by students and academics appear to have a boost on Github (Fortran, OCaml, Haskell, Java). To get over 1K you seem to need to have a unique domain where are you are or have been dominating (except for Scala, which is an outlier).

I didn't expect C++ to have so many new repos, and expected the distance between C# and C++ to be bigger. Is this because the C++ standard library is weak, or do C++ programmers have a stronger inclination to share their projects in progress on Github? I don't know, maybe C# programmers have other platforms they prefer.

Dart being so close to Kotlin and Swift is also a bit surprising; it suggests that people have a strong preference for portability. I actually thought that Haxe was fading away, but it appears to be quite strong for a language that does not receive much exposure. Again, could suggest that portability is a strong factor.

Nim and D appears to be fairly stable, so no real surprise there, but Zig is getting more attention than I would expect at this point in time. I personally don't view Zig as a particularly interesting language design, so does the apparent growth reflect early enthusiasm or does it reflect actual productivity?

Pony and Chapel are interesting languages, but maybe concurrency is not as important to most programmers as we might like to think it is. Erlang has had a lot of exposure, yet it does not have more activity than languages that receive very little exposure. So again, maybe concurrency is not a strong factor when people select programming languages (yet).

(Note: github results vary by a few % for each search, so it isn't precise).

On Monday, 25 October 2021 at 16:17:43 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Pascal which is an old almost dead language is rather high up on the list, strange. Are there tons of schools that still use Pascal? Does Pascal also include Delphi?

On Monday, 25 October 2021 at 16:39:06 UTC, IGotD- wrote:

Yes, as you can see Delphi repos have a strong presence:

https://github.com/search?q=created%3A%3E2021-08-25+language%3APascal&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=Pascal&l=

On Monday, 25 October 2021 at 16:17:43 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Interesting. But, why oh why is Fortran so high on that list? 😅

On Monday, 25 October 2021 at 17:43:29 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

My guess is that many in Physics are not interested enough in programming to become proficient in C++? There might also be communities where you are better off using what your colleagues are using. Once a language dominates a field it tends to linger on for decades…

On Monday, 25 October 2021 at 17:58:38 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Might be true. Just write what you're used to and already know. Just a bit unreasonably high still imo, but that might be the answer

On Monday, 25 October 2021 at 21:31:34 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

Yes, since we are talking new code then it is high. I would have expected relatively high maintenance levels of old repos and fewer new ones.

If we look at some of the repos then some describe themselves as being targeting "modern Fortran". So it might be that some of those repos are recreating features of existing libraries in a less archaic formulation.