These lesser-known programming languages are exploding in popularity, according to the 'Facebook for programmers' (MSFT)

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In the cutting-edge world of Silicon Valley, not only do developers have to learn the most popular programming languages, they also have to keep up with new ones.

GitHub, which hosts open-source software projects to which users can browse and contribute, has been tracking programming trends on their site each year. In their annual Octoverse report, GitHub reveals what the fastest growing languages are, as well as the most popular languages overall.

The company is seeing trends toward languages focused on thread safety and interoperability — in terms, languages that can safely execute multiple sequences at once, and that are capable of interacting with another language in the same system.

Microsoft will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion, which has been seen as a smart move for the tech titan. GitHub itself is also rapidly growing. This past year, 8 million new users joined GitHub — more users than GitHub’s first six years combined. And on Tuesday at the GitHub Universe conference, the company announced the launch of GitHub Actions, which now allow users to build and execute code on the site.

Here are the fastest-growing programming languages around, according to GitHub:

#10: SQLPL. SQLPL stands for Structured Query Language Procedural Language, and it was developed by IBM. This language is used for database systems, similarly to the industry standard, SQL.

#9: Groovy. Groovy is a dynamic programming language for the Java platform. It’s known for its concise and simple syntax. It also feels familiar to many programmers, as it has features similar to Python, Ruby and Perl.

#8: Python. Python is a high-level language that’s popular in machine learning projects. It’s popular with programmers of all skill levels because it’s easy to read. In fact, not only is it fast-growing, it's already one of the top-3 most popular languages overall.

“Python is a legit phenomenon of it’s own,” Stephen O’Grady, industry analyst with RedMonk, said at the GitHub Universe conference this week. “A lot of it comes down to the fact that it’s an incredibly versatile language. It’s escaped the track of being just front end or back end."

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