<p>September 13, 2012, 11:17 AM Redmonk has updated its semi-annual ranking of programming languages, and while there wasn't a lot of movement among the usual leaders in the list, languages like Visual Basic and CoffeeScript have shot up in their popularity since the rankings were first introduced in 2010.</p><p>It's a little hard to definitively rank programming languages; you could count the number of projects using each language, and rank those with the most projects as being the most popular. Or you could measure the size of a language's 'community,' and use that as a marker for its popularity.</p><p>Redmonk uses a method originally developed by developer Drew Conway, which ranks using a little bit of both methods.</p><p>"To do this, [Conway] compared the traction of the languages on both GitHub and StackOverflow, communities that are both popular with developers and yet have somewhat distinct communities. GitHub's rankings are based on GitHub's own stacking of the individual languages, while the languages on StackOverflow are ranked according to the volume of tags associated with each language," explained [Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady.</p><p><a href="http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/295084/java-javascript-still-highly-ranked-languages">Keep reading...</a></p>