News

ChatGPT's Impact on App-Dev? GitHub Site Gives Instant Insights

• By David Ramel
• 07/17/2024

GitHub just updated its online open data and insights platform that provides information on the global and local impact of developers, letting users instantly see their own software development trends.

The GitHub Innovation Graph was just updated with Q1 2024 data, adding to data troves that started in Q1 2020. The company launched the tool in 2023 with the purpose of letting anyone -- researchers, policymakers, developers and so on -- access data in order to glean insights on software development trends.

The data is available for download by metric or economy, and visualizes the top programming languages, Git pushes, organizations, developers, licenses and more.

"The last four years of data insights have significantly aided researchers in observing and measuring trends in software development," a spokesperson told Visual Studio Magazine in a July 17 email. "For example, one study uses Innovation Graph data to show how the proliferation of ChatGPT across the world has begun to enhance developer engagement across various programming languages and that, rather than ChatGPT bringing significantly more developers to the field, it's being used to accelerate existing devs' work." See more about that below.

Programming languages are always a hot topic in the software development world, and the tool provides insights into the top languages by country. For example, in the U.S. and globally, JavaScript was the highest ranked programming language based on the number of unique developers who uploaded code, followed by Python and Shell. The tool also lets users track their own areas of interest, such as the ascent of Microsoft's TypeScript language, which has been gaining in popularity:

Other insight highlights specific to the U.S. unveiled by the new data include:

• More than 22,233,000 American developers and over 1,220,000 American organizations are building on GitHub
• American developers uploaded code to GitHub more than 27.2 million times
• American developers and/or organizations owned over 60.5 million repositories on GitHub
• The U.S.' top three collaborators were: United Kingdom, Germany and Canada

GitHub also published a blog post interviewing Alexander Quispe of the World Bank and Rodrigo Grijalba, a data scientist, about how they used the Innovation Graph in their ongoing research. The post explains how they used the tool to estimate the impact of ChatGPT on developer engagement across various programming languages.

Their research specifically analyzed the impact of ChatGPT on the velocity of software development, finding that the availability of ChatGPT:

• Significantly increased the number of Git pushes per 100,000 inhabitants of each country.
• Had a positive (although not statistically significant) correlation with the number of repositories and developers per 100,000 inhabitants.
• Generally enhanced developer engagement across various programming languages. High-level languages like Python and JavaScript showed significant increases in unique developers, while the impact on domain-specific languages like HTML and SQL varied.

"These results would imply that the impact of ChatGPT thus far does not lie in the increase of developers or projects, but in an acceleration of the pre-established development process," the post said.