Prolog is a big surprise here. If anyone can explain that, I'd be interested
I'd just about be willing to bet money that it's just bad data. Github try to autodetect the primary language for repos, and their detection isn't always right. In fact, I've found it to be wrong quite often. I'm guessing they have tagged more than a few repos as "prolog" that aren't really prolog at all.
Personally, I really think they should let the repo owner configure this, or at least let them override the auto-detected value if it's wrong. But so far, there doesn't seem to be any way to do that (at least not that I've found).
It's interesting to see Fantom and Awk tied for second-to-last place. Strange bedfellows!
It's also interesting, to me at least, to see Nimrod and Ceylon with similar numbers of repositories. I've seen Nimrod linked to and mentioned here a number of times. I don't think i've ever seen Ceylon mentioned. I find Ceylon very interesting, because it's an attempt to build a Java successor without falling into the kitchen sink of madness that Scala has.
How are those two links related to "ruby sucks as a language". I tried tons of languages, from php to js, obj-c, clojure, golang, java, scala, python and coffeescript (not really a lang tho :)). Ruby is without doubt one of the best designed languages. The syntax might not be the right thing for everyone (I don't like python's for instance), but the language itself is really well designed to be as natural and less surprising as possible for developers. OOP wise it's a pleasure to work with. PHP is basically the opposite.
In general on the topic: Major reasons why Ruby and JS lead the whole thing is that a) the communities are extremely huge and active (in open source) and b) smaller modules/gems are preferred over huge frameworks (yes rails is huge, but it's actually a set of other gems - sort of). And since the author sorted by the amount of projects and not the lines of code, JS leads the list due to a ton of small modules (e.g. for node.js or component).
Rails sucking isn't necessarily Ruby's fault. If more devs actually learned Ruby and not just Rails, they'd come to appreciate that it's a fantastic dynamic language...
I'd just about be willing to bet money that it's just bad data. Github try to autodetect the primary language for repos, and their detection isn't always right. In fact, I've found it to be wrong quite often. I'm guessing they have tagged more than a few repos as "prolog" that aren't really prolog at all.
Personally, I really think they should let the repo owner configure this, or at least let them override the auto-detected value if it's wrong. But so far, there doesn't seem to be any way to do that (at least not that I've found).