Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#1

Post by devmonk » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 4:17 PM UTC

Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits
ohloh.net

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#2

Post by wingo » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 4:50 PM UTC

NumPy: -157,525 lines of code, mostly written in Modula-2.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#3

Post by technomancy » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:00 PM UTC

I suspect it has more to do with the mechanism by which commit volume is measured than the actual commits themselves.

It's possible people are just moving away from verbose languages like C and Java and thus just needing to write less code, but I'm not sure I have enough faith in the human race to believe it.

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#4

Post by shurik » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:01 PM UTC

The decline is in C, dynamic languages are on the rise. May be everything that had to be written in C has already been written?

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#5

Post by sprout » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:02 PM UTC

Seems to shadow the recession. I wonder how this compares to closed-source commits.

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#6

Post by thingie » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:03 PM UTC

You'll get totally different picture if you remove C (even if you just replace it with C++) and Java. So, hm?

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#7

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:05 PM UTC

shurik wrote: post #4

The decline is in C, dynamic languages are on the rise. May be everything that had to be written in C has already been written?

It looks like the dynamic languages have been declining as well, though C's drop is much larger both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers.

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#8

Post by Corrado » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:08 PM UTC

thingie wrote: post #6

You'll get totally different picture if you remove C (even if you just replace it with C++) and Java. So, hm?

For the lazy: http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#9

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:09 PM UTC

sprout wrote: post #5

Seems to shadow the recession. I wonder how this compares to closed-source commits.

One theory: programmer utilization at companies has increased with the recession, so there is less time for open-source commits.

Another theory: a huge fraction of open-source in recent years is written by programmers paid by companies to work on it. The recession has caused these programmers to be pulled off and put on projects where their time can be billed directly.

Third theory, there is more use of distributed version control "offline", which would not be detected by Ohloh.

Re: Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits

#10

Post by Corrado » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 5:11 PM UTC

technomancy wrote: post #3

I suspect it has more to do with the mechanism by which commit volume is measured than the actual commits themselves. It's possible people are just moving away from verbose languages like C and Java and thus just needing to write less code, but I'm not sure I have enough faith in the human race to believe it.

Another possible reason is that as systems become more mature they require less maintenance. I know the 2 or 3 projects that I am involved with are pretty mature right now and we are mostly just fixing bugs.