Computers have become a staple product across the world, and especially in recent years, they have experienced a boom in growth. With greater access to computers, software development has also undergone significant growth. In this article, we’ll take a look at the demographics of GitHub “pushers,” their habits, and their countries to get a sense of global trends within software development.
GitHub, developed and maintained by Microsoft, is one of the most widely used software development tools, serving as both a storage tool and a collaboration environment for developers. GitHub hosts Git repositories, which, in layman’s terms, are codebases. Chances are that nearly any software you use has some portion of its code stored on GitHub.
Developers “push” code to GitHub, which puts their code on the service. This workflow is so ingrained within the software development process that nearly any code a developer writes will make its way to GitHub or a similar service. As such, studying the behaviors of GitHub “pushers” can give us a good estimate of global trends within development.
As part of the data we analyze, we consider the Human Development Index (HDI) of the country where the pusher is pushing from. The HDI is a metric developed by the United Nations to assess a country’s average progress in health, education, and standard of living. The HDI gives a broad picture of a country’s overall development. HDI ranges from 0 to 1, where less developed countries have a lower score and more developed countries have a higher score.
Throughout this article, we’d like to take a look at the high level trends within the software development lifecycle, and make inferences about the modern state of development globally.
Growth in Lower HDI Countries?
An analysis of demographic data shows very clearly that, since 2020, the number of developers from countries with a lower HDI has exploded. While the majority of developers still reside in countries with higher HDI, this trend is a major point of interest. But why? A look into the types of software development and languages used can shine a light on this question.
Who’s Programming in What Language?
It is very important to note that not all software development is equal. While all software involves some amount of code, the typical language, the problems faced, and the day-to-day development tasks can look vastly different. While a graphics programmer may be stressing over triangles and lighting models, a DevOps engineer may be worried about maintaining efficient CI/CD pipelines for their teams. New languages and new fields emerge daily, but they do not necessarily replace older, more mature languages and ways of working.
In our analysis, we found an interesting trend: trending languages such as Rust and Go tend to be more widely used in higher-HDI countries, suggesting that these countries often help set the direction of newer infrastructure and frontier software work. By contrast, mature web and application-layer languages such as PHP, HTML, and JavaScript are still backbones of modern technology, but they are more established and widely deployed across existing software systems.
Let’s take a look at the languages developers have been using, who has been developing with them, and what they are typically used for.
R, Rust, Ruby, and Go are prominently used by higher-HDI countries. R is a language synonymous with research and development, used heavily by academics and researchers. Rust and Go, meanwhile, are newer systems-level programming languages. These languages point to a promising future for software, but they do not necessarily enable entirely new software products or fully replace their predecessors. In fact, within systems programming, these languages still represent a minority of development. Ruby is a bit of an oddball here, but it is commonly used for backend web development. However, Ruby is no longer the dominant language in that domain.
C#, Python, TypeScript, Swift, and C++ do not fall heavily on either side of the global mean HDI for developers. This suggests that the HDI of a developer’s country does not necessarily indicate whether they will or will not develop in these languages. These languages are used widely around the world, serving mostly as general-purpose languages, with the exception of Swift. They are also slightly older and more established. Many of the world’s codebases are built on these languages, meaning there is a large amount of ongoing development and maintenance for projects that use them.
Kotlin, JavaScript, HTML, and PHP are very established application-layer languages. They are often what make software visible and usable to everyday users. Coincidentally, these are also some of the most widely deployed programming languages in the world. Because they are so established, there is a lot of active development using these languages, as well as ongoing software maintenance. Many developers’ work revolves around maintaining existing codebases and keeping them functional. Our hypothesis is that because these languages are so significant and used globally, the mean HDI of the countries where developers use these languages tends to be lower, since most countries have a lower HDI.
Taken together, these trends suggest that programming language use is not just a technical choice. It can also reflect where countries sit within the global software economy. Higher-HDI countries appear more strongly associated with languages tied to newer infrastructure, specialized tooling, and frontier-facing development. Meanwhile, lower-HDI countries show more activity around widely deployed application-layer languages, which are essential to building and maintaining the software people interact with every day.
However, language choice only gives us part of the picture. A programming language can be used for many different kinds of work. Python might be used for research, backend services, automation, or education; JavaScript might power a small website or a massive global platform. To better understand what developers in different countries are actually building, we need to move beyond individual languages and look at broader categories of software development. In the next section, we group languages into development areas such as web frontend, mobile, systems, backend, and DevOps to see how these types of work vary across HDI levels.
Who Develops What Software?
Much of the work in lower-HDI countries centers around web development alongside some mobile development while higher-HDI countries spread their focus towards systems, enterprise, backend, DevOps, and game/graphics work. Indeed, trends would suggest that developed economies usually focus on R&D, premium products, IP and target global enterprise markets whereas less developed economies put much more focus towards more widely deployed applications in the web and mobile markets.
Take a Look at Trends within Different Types of Development
Within these fields, web development dominates worldwide. And with less developed countries holding most of the share in this market, the bulk of developers worldwide are rising from these countries.
Global Trends In Language Choice
The pattern is better framed as established application-layer work versus trending infrastructure-level work. Mature languages such as PHP, Java, HTML, and CSS remain backbones of modern software, while languages such as Rust and Go are often associated with newer infrastructure and frontier technical work.
What Does this Mean?
Less developed countries from the south follow the trend of holding much more significant shares in established web and application-layer languages, signalling application development as a pathway for growth for these countries. Of course, this is not the only pathway for these countries. And as access to technology continues to grow across the globe, much of the work in both creating modern applications and shaping future software infrastructure could be fulfilled by developing countries.