GitHub Linguist is reasonably accurate at automatically detecting the percentages of each code language in Git tracked code. However, as with any automatic coding language detection scheme, mis-detected languages occur. This seems to happen for our uses most often with Matlab code. Despite being in the top 10 STEM / data science languages, Matlab / GNU Octave *.m files can be detected as other languages such as Objective-C or Limbo.

Fix

Add to each Matlab repo’s .gitattributes file:

*.m linguist-language=Matlab

Verify

Simply git push your code and look at the GitHub repo language graph.

If you frequently need to auto-detect code and prefer Python, consider our Linguist Python wrapper of GitHub Linguist.