GitHub is only one metric, and it’s hardly the best metric.

Programming languages are not a popularity contest. What counts is jobs in the marketplace and what companies are doing with these languages, neither of which GitHub sheds any light on.

At Indeed, Java has the second highest number of job postings, just behind Python. The enterprise market is HUGE.

Most enterprise companies keep their projects internal and do not share them on GitHub. Think of GitHub like an iceberg where 90% of the world’s projects are invisible.

Moreover, enterprises use many different source code control systems besides GitHub, like CVS, SVN, Mercurial, Bazaar, TFS, Helix Core, ClearCase, RCS, VSS, PVCS, Vault, CodeCommit, Monotone. And that’s just off the top of my head! Needless to say, GitHub cannot possibly provide an accurate picture of what languages are used for enterprise computing.

Java is still the enterprise standard programming language. Spring, JSF, Struts, Vaadin, etc. are still widely used.

Java remains the chief Android programming language (Kotlin is way, way behind).

Developers have most certainly not lost their appetite for Java.