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I had assumed that there would be an easy to find list of programming languages sorted by the number of libraries that they have. I have been able to find no such thing. Is there any way to find or make such a list? Specifically, what would be the top 5? I understand that this would require defining what is and isn't a library, but I was shocked to see that I couldn't find even as much as an attempt at such a list.

J. Mini
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  • The problem here is that most programming languages have their preferences in managing and storing packages. Even if we skip a loooot of packages hosted on github (which is quite hard to calculate) and private repos. E.g. some of them: 1) for PHP - packagist (and others) 2) for Ruby - rubygem (and others) 3) for C++ - vcpkg (and others) ... So, the problem here is to combine and compare data from a lot of different sources. And to make things worse, it doesn't have any scientific sense). My speculation: more popular and oldest languages (C/C++, Java, JavaScript, etc.) will be in the top. – Crazy Panda Aug 09 '21 at 08:27
  • Also, some languages need more libraries because of a lack of features in the standard libraries. Specifically, C has dozens or hundreds of implementations of linked lists, because it has no/few standard "containers" type of structures in its library. All are unofficial, so it makes little sense to count libraries like those. – John Bayko Aug 10 '21 at 16:04

4 Answers4

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Check the Website http://www.modulecounts.com/

The top three are:

  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. Python

Please Note - Having more libraries Does not mean it's better.

It strongly depends on the use.

Rajath Rao - Software Engineer
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    That's an interesting dataset to play around with. I picked a very recent date and removed the NA values. The amount of node.js scripts is shocking. https://imgur.com/aymIt5K – J. Mini Aug 10 '21 at 16:59
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I rank programming languages by their efficiency to solve problems in either a general case (otherwise unspecified) or in a specific domain such as:

  • Robotics
  • Mobile computers
  • Mathematics and Science
  • Web development
  • Embedded systems
  • Systems programming
  • Network and infrastructure programming
  • Database programming

Consider the following. According to IEEE, the popularity of a programming language is measured by quantifying these indicators:

  • Google Search, number of hits for the programming language
  • Google Trends, past year to date trend for programming language
  • Chatter on Twitter about the programming language
  • New and active repos' on Github for a particular language
  • SO
  • Hacker News
  • Demand on career builder and IEEE job board

The result is this

enter image description here

R and javascript/typescript are in the same list. However, they are primarily used in different domains. This does NOT mean that R cannot be used to write a solution that would typically be written in javascript, it simply means that it is the wrong tool for the job.

A little more detail on this.

General Purpose:

  1. Python ~ Easy to use, easy to learn, known for data science.
  2. JAVA ~ Popular for enterprises and client/server topos' since the intro of the concept of JVM (run code on any architecture).
  3. C++ ~ Fast. I mean REALLY FAST! game engines are built with it.

Embedded Systems and Programs:

  1. C ~ low memory usage, small file size. Every microcontroller in every car built after 2011 probably has a C program running on it
  2. Assembly ~ but not so much since one needs low-level microprocessor knowledge
  3. Rust ~ very promising because of memory leak handling.

Web:

  1. Javascript ~ every dynamic website has js in it
  2. HTML ~ I don't understand how this was missed

IaaS:

  1. Golang ~ nothing even comes close to Go

It is important to understand, that the problems within the domain, are what necessitate the development of a new programming language library if one does not exist already. And not the other way around.

One can also argue, that continual improvement of technological standards, leads to new, and improved libraries at a faster pace.

Ondiek
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This is a bit difficult question as it depends on what do you count as a publicly available library. One way is to check most used languages on GitHub. Checking out The 2020 State of the OCTOVERSE, the top three are:

  1. JavaScript
  2. Python
  3. Java
Roman Pavelka
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I'm not sure there is any plausible, comprehensive and credible statistical data on which languages have the most publicly available libraries, that covers, at least, substantial number of programming languages (not even talking about all languages).

Therefore, your question will, most likely, lead to opinion based answers, and you should avoid asking such questions on Stack Overflow.

The only reliable resources that come to my mind, and that will give you the data about popularity of the programming languages (not publicly available APIs) are Tiobe and Redmonk.

Giorgi Tsiklauri
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