Atom: A Casual Analysis on Language Popularity

TL;DR — template languages

What are the most common languages that people using Atom develop in? I was quite curious about the answer and did a little research to find out.

I searched for Atom packages that add language syntax support, and used their download counts as a mean of measurement. Packages that came prebundled with Atom were excluded because their downloads no longer accurately depict real usage, and packages that add support to the same language were having their numbers combined.

The result is captivating:

50% of activities were in: Haml, Jade, JSX, C#, LaTeX, Handlebars, Scala, Rust, Haskell, Twig, Stylus

• While there is a total of 273 languages, more than 50% of activities were happening in 11 of them.
• 5 out of the top 11 are HTML template languages, and take up more than 27% of total downloads.

The complete data being used can be found in this gist.

While this casual analysis lacks data on those languages that came prebundled and should not be seriously treated, it nevertheless offers an interesting insight — even perhaps a useful one, if you’re into developing packages for Atom.