Languages gaining and losing ground.
Which languages are UK developers actively working in, against what they have left behind?
TypeScript is 19.1% of the programming-language repositories UK developers worked on in 2026, against 6.8% of those left untouched since 2021–22 (+12.3 points; n=152,194 repositories; markup, shell and unlabelled repositories not counted).
Sample: 152,194 repositories · source: public GitHub profiles · data to 24 September 2026
By language
| Language | Figure | Sample (repositories) | In words |
|---|---|---|---|
| TypeScript | +12.3 pts | 152,194 | TypeScript: 19.1% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 6.8% of those dormant since 2021–22 (12.3 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Python | +6.5 pts | 152,194 | Python: 26.1% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 19.6% of those dormant since 2021–22 (6.5 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Rust | +2 pts | 152,194 | Rust: 3.5% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 1.5% of those dormant since 2021–22 (2 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Go | +0.8 pts | 152,194 | Go: 3.1% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 2.3% of those dormant since 2021–22 (0.8 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| C | 0 pts | 152,194 | C: 1.9% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 1.9% of those dormant since 2021–22 (0 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Swift | -0.1 pts | 152,194 | Swift: 1.3% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 1.3% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-0.1 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| R | -0.3 pts | 152,194 | R: 1.3% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 1.6% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-0.3 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| C++ | -0.4 pts | 152,194 | C++: 3.2% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 3.7% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-0.4 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Kotlin | -0.5 pts | 152,194 | Kotlin: 0.9% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 1.4% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-0.5 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| PHP | -0.5 pts | 152,194 | PHP: 2% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 2.6% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-0.5 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Jupyter Notebook | -1.8 pts | 152,194 | Jupyter Notebook: 6.2% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 8% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-1.8 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Ruby | -1.8 pts | 152,194 | Ruby: 1.1% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 2.8% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-1.8 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| C# | -2.1 pts | 152,194 | C#: 3.7% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 5.8% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-2.1 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| Java | -4.2 pts | 152,194 | Java: 3.1% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 7.3% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-4.2 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
| JavaScript | -10.5 pts | 152,194 | JavaScript: 14.8% of programming-language repositories worked on in 2026 vs 25.3% of those dormant since 2021–22 (-10.5 points; n=152,194 repositories). |
How this is measured
UK developers' public repositories: each language's share of repositories updated in 2026 (active) minus its share of repositories last updated in 2021–2022 and untouched since (dormant), in percentage points. Only repositories with a programming language count: GitHub's unlabelled repositories and markup / style / shell / build-file ones (HTML, CSS, Shell, Dockerfile …, a third of all) are in neither group, so shares are of programming-language repositories. Languages with at least 1,000 repositories in each group. n = programming-language repositories updated in 2026 (not developers). Not a growth rate: GitHub keeps only the last update, so this compares where work is happening now with what has been left alone, which also favours languages used for new projects. value_json: active_pct, dormant_pct and the repository counts. Overall: the biggest gain. Source: public GitHub profiles and their public repositories (the teky search dataset; each finding's date is the date the data runs to). Population: GitHub accounts whose stated location we confirm as the UK or mainland China — the geocoder's country is re-checked against the location text (DevLocation), which drops "Cambridge, MA", "Stanford, CA", "Birmingham, AL" and "Philadelphia, PA"-style mis-codes and bare town names shared with a larger place abroad, and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan; organisation accounts and profiles with no GitHub account are excluded. It describes developers who publish on GitHub and state where they are, not every developer: it leans towards open-source contributors, academics and students, and Chinese developers also use Gitee, so China is under-represented. n = developers (GitHub accounts) unless the insight says otherwise.
Cite this
Free to quote with a credit and a link.
ProdReady Recruitment (2026). Languages gaining and losing ground. Data to 24 September 2026. https://ProdReadyRecruitment.com/research/dev_language_momentum
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