Languages that cities love

We built a small tool that helps us recruit. It periodically pulls data off of Github for developers in India, and shows how they are connected. You can watch this 2-minute video to understand how it works.

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This data also helps us understand how popular different programming languages are across cities. For example, if we take the top cities, based on the number of users (we’ve been fuzzy about the geography and included Colombo and Singapore into the mix)…

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… and the top programming languages, again based on the number of users …

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… it begs the question: is the popularity of languages the same across cities? Or are there certain cities that love or hate certain languages?

This is the distribution of programmers across these cities:

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This does not readily lead to any insights. But we could look at this number differently. If all cities had the same distribution, then what would these numbers have looked like? In other words, how many developers of each programming language would each city have had? That’s shown below:

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So, for example, Bangalore actually has 321 Javascript developers. But if it had the same percentage of Javascript developers as other cities, it would just have had 263 Javascript developers. So clearly, there are more Javascripters in Bangalore than you’d expect.

The numbers below show the difference between the expected and actual number of programmers.

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A few things stand out:

• If you’re looking for Javascript programmers, Bangalore and Mumbai would be the two places to visit. There are considerably more Javascript programmers here than you’d expect.
• On the other hand, if you’re looking for Java programmers, you’d be much better off visiting Delhi, followed by Chennai and Bangalore.
• There’s only one city to visit for Python programmers – Bangalore. The rest are scattered across the minor cities. (A closer look at the data reveals that a reasonable number are in Kerala.)
• Colombo, on the other hand, looks primarily like a Ruby shop. The focus seems to be server-side development. Javascript programmers are much rarer than normal.
• Gurgaon is the primary PHP hub. The city is under-represented in most popular programming languages, but has a thriving group of PHP programmers (a language that Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai seem to actively dislike.)
• The biggest hub for iOS developers (Objective-C) is Singapore. Within India, only Pune seems to have a slightly larger than usual number of iOS developers – but that’s a meagre 20 programmers.

Whether you’re a start-up looking for your lead developers, or an IT firm recruiting open source geeks, or just a geek yourself looking for friends to hack with, we hope this gives you a idea of which city to visit next.