Main programming languages.
What do UK developers mainly code in, and how does China compare?
Python is the main language of 25.3% of UK developers on GitHub (China 29.6%; n=139,576).
Sample: 139,576 developers · source: public GitHub profiles · data to 24 September 2026
By language
| Language | Figure | Sample (developers) | In words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 25.3% | 139,576 | Python is the main language of 25.3% of UK developers, against 29.6% in China (n=139,576). |
| JavaScript | 19.7% | 139,576 | JavaScript is the main language of 19.7% of UK developers, against 14.7% in China (n=139,576). |
| TypeScript | 10.8% | 139,576 | TypeScript is the main language of 10.8% of UK developers, against 8.4% in China (n=139,576). |
| Jupyter Notebook | 8.7% | 139,576 | Jupyter Notebook is the main language of 8.7% of UK developers, against 2.6% in China (n=139,576). |
| Java | 5.4% | 139,576 | Java is the main language of 5.4% of UK developers, against 12.8% in China (n=139,576). |
| C# | 5.2% | 139,576 | C# is the main language of 5.2% of UK developers, against 2.3% in China (n=139,576). |
| C++ | 3.3% | 139,576 | C++ is the main language of 3.3% of UK developers, against 6.9% in China (n=139,576). |
| PHP | 3.1% | 139,576 | PHP is the main language of 3.1% of UK developers, against 1.3% in China (n=139,576). |
| Go | 2.4% | 139,576 | Go is the main language of 2.4% of UK developers, against 4.6% in China (n=139,576). |
| Ruby | 2.1% | 139,576 | Ruby is the main language of 2.1% of UK developers, against 0.6% in China (n=139,576). |
| R | 1.9% | 139,576 | R is the main language of 1.9% of UK developers, against 0.6% in China (n=139,576). |
| Rust | 1.7% | 139,576 | Rust is the main language of 1.7% of UK developers, against 1.5% in China (n=139,576). |
| C | 1.6% | 139,576 | C is the main language of 1.6% of UK developers, against 3.7% in China (n=139,576). |
| Swift | 1.2% | 139,576 | Swift is the main language of 1.2% of UK developers, against 1.1% in China (n=139,576). |
| Kotlin | 0.9% | 139,576 | Kotlin is the main language of 0.9% of UK developers, against 1.1% in China (n=139,576). |
How this is measured
A developer's main language is the GitHub-detected language of most of their public repositories, those updated since 2024 weighted double; markup, styles, shells and build files (HTML, CSS, Shell, Dockerfile, Makefile …) do not count. value = % of UK developers with a main language; value_json.china_pct the same for mainland China. Jupyter Notebook is its own GitHub language (mostly Python data work). 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). Main programming languages. Data to 24 September 2026. https://ProdReadyRecruitment.com/research/dev_languages
Need a custom cut?
Journalists and analysts can ask for a breakdown by sector, city, region or language, or the underlying table.
Ask us