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GitHut – Programming Languages on GitHub

by jrslv on 2/11/15, 10:37 AM with 124 comments

  • by jvilk on 2/11/15, 5:59 PM

    While I dig the idea, it's important to note a few issues with the dataset. Take the presented data with a huge grain of salt.

    First, many repositories are not a single language. For example, this PHP framework is reported as a CSS project [0]. While it has more lines of CSS than PHP, it only has a single CSS file [1].

    Second, GitHub has a problem with correctly identifying programming languages. For example, PrimeCoin [1] is identified as one of the most popular TypeScript repositories, but it has 0 lines of TypeScript code. Instead, it has... large localization files with the extension *.ts [2]. BitCoin used to have the same problem, but it looks like GitHub hack fixed it for that particular repository as less popular forks of BitCoin still have this issue.

    It took me a few minutes to find these examples, just by examining trending repositories [4]. I'm sure there are many more. So do not be rash in drawing conclusions from this data! :)

    [0] https://github.com/laravel/laravel

    [1] https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/public/css/ap...

    [2] https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin

    [3] https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/tree/master/src/qt/lo...

    [4] https://github.com/trending

  • by V-2 on 2/11/15, 12:46 PM

    It's what I call an "AHA" piece of statistics.

    Lots of data right there, and nicely visualised at that, only what it actually means is unfathomable without knowing any broader context.

    For instance: C++ has the greatest number of opened issues per repository, then comes Rust, then Scala. All right.

    Does it indicate that they're more tricky than others and hence more bug reports?

    Or perhaps that projects written in these languages are under more intense scrutiny?

    Or that people watching these repositories are just more eager to step up and file an issue instead of sulking in silence (a trait of programming culture surrounding these languages)?

    And so on, and so on.

    Or it could be one in case of C++, another in case of Rust - since they differ under so many aspects.

    Wide field for wildest speculations, but no meaningful correlations identified.

  • by arcticfox on 2/11/15, 4:36 PM

    Am I the only one that doesn't like the visualization? It seems like it would be fundamentally better if each bar was simply labeled instead of connected via line. Mouseover could highlight the same language in the other categories to get the cross-category information.

    The question "What is ranked above Ruby for New Watchers Per Repository?" seems to be a question this dataset should be answering, but it is enormously difficult to parse here.

  • by bhouston on 2/11/15, 1:17 PM

    Languages with near flat or decreases in 2014:

    - Ruby (that was a bit surprising)

    - Dart (I guess the lack of native browser support is the killer here)

    - Typescript (I'm surprised this didn't take off)

    - Puppet (Interesting.)

    - ActionScript (obvious now that Flash is dead)

    - Scheme

    - Common Lisp

    - D

    - Fortran

    - Logos (huh?)

    (I know near flat is subjective, but still these are the languages that are not seeing much growth in 2014, and what likely isn't growing strong in 2014, is likely to continue that trend in 2015.)

  • by ignoramous on 2/11/15, 5:07 PM

    OCaml desperately needs some wind on its sail. It fares poorly than PowerShell in terms of # of repos, and that says it all really. Compared to Haskell and Clojure, which are soaring to put it mildly.

  • by RA_Fisher on 2/11/15, 1:59 PM

    R's bump in Q1Y14 is probably when CRAN, R's largest "official" repo archive pushed all of its packages to Github. Pretty neat to see the volume right there.

  • by andrewstuart2 on 2/11/15, 1:07 PM

    Beautiful use of D3. Looks like something Bostock himself would've made for the New York Times.

  • by Fiahil on 2/11/15, 1:08 PM

    Rust is showing some interesting traits. Despite its slow start, it's catching up quickly enough.

  • by galfarragem on 2/11/15, 3:10 PM

    Erlang and Clojure don't seem to take off on github, despite being very visible in HN..

    It seems that everybody speaks about these languages but then they don't use them.

  • by snhkicker on 2/11/15, 5:41 PM

    I think that these statistics are a bit under-rated and a bit misleading

    -under-rated: CSS: has 80% more pushes than C++ WOW :O Javascript: remains to be super for small projects but man this sure brings a tear to your eye when you see 10.69 pushes per repo i think i may have misunderstood JS alot Safe Languages: are probably not as safe as we think

    -misleading: the fact that this isn't talking in anyway about the industry itself but about the LOVE given to each programming language for the following reasons:

    a)Developers in general contribute to opensource programming projects with the same concept gcc devs used when saying "compiling GCC as C++, we are writing code if you want it as C do so your self" as i understood it

    b)Interest and Time and Location on Github diverge from reality: Interest: Developers are interested in doing new things when it comes to Open Source so this may affect numbers alot Time:time changes everything Location: i think Github is number 1 place when it comes to Front-end programmers although every one likes it but in Javascript i think Github is the super man

  • by CmonDev on 2/11/15, 2:10 PM

    If only there was a way of analyzing the quality of the repository. Are those 1000s of snippet-size JS libraries and Ruby gems meaningful?

    It's interesting that strong static languages have more issues open (top 5) - easier to spot them?

  • by ryanmarsh on 2/11/15, 6:41 PM

    This is really good example of a useful slopegraph. I find so few of these in the wild thus I often fail to articulate the value of the approach such that a client will buy into the idea before I build it.

    for reference: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

    edit: the use of "small multiples" is superb as well

  • by hharnisch on 2/11/15, 4:09 PM

    It would be incredibly enlightening to see what languages people are moving to/from. (like this for but for programming languages - https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/coordin...). I'd like to know what people are switching to from Ruby.

  • by vinceyuan on 2/11/15, 3:17 PM

    Surprised to see the oldest programming language is Makefile (1970) in this chart. It appeared earlier than C (1972). Is this correct?

  • by themoonbus on 2/11/15, 4:28 PM

    Languages from the early to mid 90's are doing quite well. 95 alone saw Java, JavaScript, Ruby and PHP.

  • by visarga on 2/12/15, 4:52 AM

    The top five languages were all created initially between 1991 and 1996. Is that by coincidence? Probably languages have a lifecycle and age matters a lot. The current top crop are about 20y.o. - just becoming adults. Would that mean that Swift and Rust will get in top 5 after year 2030?

  • by davedx on 2/11/15, 1:07 PM

    Open issues per repository is an interesting one.

    I'd love to see open issues / LoC / repo for each language.

  • by krat0sprakhar on 2/11/15, 12:52 PM

    Looks like 1995 was a great year for programming languages - PHP, Java, Javascript and Ruby were released!

  • by carsonreinke on 2/11/15, 2:12 PM

    It would be really neat to see how many repos have been abandoned per language (e.g. no activity in X)

  • by robbyking on 2/11/15, 5:29 PM

    It's interesting to me that so many Objective C repositories have so few pushes yet so many forks. I wonder if it's because companies like Facebook and Square "release" open source projects on Github then move on to something else.

  • by gamesbrainiac on 2/11/15, 12:32 PM

    Any new change that is of particular interest? I believe this page has been on HN before.

  • by megalodon on 2/11/15, 1:36 PM

    Just a heads up; the page header (and footer?) does not render correctly on mobile. The top graph is centered and its data is impossible to read because of label overlapping. Interesting analysis nevertheless.

  • by pama on 2/12/15, 1:50 AM

    Swift wins the popularity contest: most watches per repository, third most forks per repository (R has most forks per repository). Anyone up for an iOS/Mac App with a statistics backend?

  • by droob on 2/11/15, 1:07 PM

    This is just _public_ repos, right? That might skew numbers a bit.

  • by tdicola on 2/11/15, 8:37 PM

    Is the data behind this visualization available anywhere or do people need to run the BigQuery queries themselves?

  • by vinceyuan on 2/11/15, 3:00 PM

    Thought GitHub published it officially. Just found it's GitHu(t) instead of GitHu(b). LOL Anyway, good job!

  • by nXqd on 2/11/15, 1:21 PM

    Really nice statistics. I would love to know the name of that kind of statistics graph ? Thanks !

  • by sagivo on 2/11/15, 4:57 PM

    a look here (https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars) shows that from the top 10 all-time-stars 6 are javascript related.

  • by okcwarrior on 2/12/15, 2:46 AM

    My C# MVC Web App is reported as a Javascript app because of the templates I use :0

  • by bmoresbest55 on 2/11/15, 3:12 PM

    Java developer learning Django and playing with Node, React and Angular. 3/3.

  • by duderific on 2/11/15, 7:57 PM

    Sad to see, my dear old friend ColdFusion did not even make the list.

  • by montogeek on 2/12/15, 4:54 AM

    This was already submitted months ago :s

  • by pla3rhat3r on 2/11/15, 3:50 PM

    Beautifully designed page!

  • by ayr-ton on 2/11/15, 6:31 PM

    It is just beautiful.

  • by VOYD on 2/11/15, 7:20 PM

    I like it.

  • by biomimic on 2/11/15, 4:14 PM

    What about Tcl?

  • by Eleutheria on 2/11/15, 3:28 PM

    When too much interactiveness is too much.

  • by zzzcpan on 2/11/15, 2:29 PM

    This confirmed some of my suspicions. Ruby seems to be in decline, just like Perl, but not declared dead yet, maybe in a few years. Python looks like it's getting to that point as well, hard to tell though, will be clear in a year. Go is growing fast and already ahead of Perl.