GitHub Language Trends

#1

Post by spatten » Sun, May 04, 2014, 4:24 AM UTC

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#2

Post by err4nt » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:37 AM UTC

Very interesting graphs, I was surprised that CSS has had a recent uptick but as somebody who has specialized in responsive layout in the past two years I guess that uptick represents my life too.

I can't get enough language statistics on Github! I run 'gitinspector' on my web server to compute language stats in individual git repositories, but one thing I haven't been able to figure out it how to chart the language stats for one git repository over time in a branch.

Does anybody know how you can chart language use over time in one repository?

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#3

Post by gexla » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:03 AM UTC

I don't know this is a good indication of trends. As the article (somewhat shallowly) shows, there are stories behind of these graphs.

Ruby has probably just settled to a normal position post early adopter. Shows that Ruby is still strong.

Javascript is probably building the sorts of libraries that other languages already have. These guys have had a lot of work to do.

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#4

Post by largehotcoffee » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:32 AM UTC

>Language detection is based on lines of code

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#5

Post by davidw » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:39 AM UTC

gexla wrote: post #3

I don't know this is a good indication of trends. As the article (somewhat shallowly) shows, there are stories behind of these graphs. Ruby has probably just settled to a normal position post early adopter. Shows that Ruby is still strong. Javascript is probably building the sorts of libraries that other languages already have. These guys have had a lot of work to do.

Yes, Ruby was very much "overrepresented" in the early days of github, so the decline in its growth relative to other languages is fairly normal sounding, rather than indicative of its actual decline.

Also, Javascript is something that is going to get checked in to lots of web projects one way or another. I wonder if they weed out duplicate copies of, say, jQuery.

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#6

Post by rumcajz » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:39 AM UTC

This looks like commercial ecosystem (Java, JavaScript) migrating to GitHub rather than hobbyist ecosystems (Ruby, Python, Perl) being on decline.

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#7

Post by alexchamberlain » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:55 AM UTC

What is the cause for the correlation between Java and JavaScript?

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#8

Post by sheetjs » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:58 AM UTC

FWIW many projects written in web languages like PHP seem to be treated as javascript by Github because they also have javascript code (which happens to be more significant / larger than the underlying code). It's unfortunate that there is no way to specify the primary language of a project.

The Github language system is also somewhat unpredictable: https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files seems to alternate between AppleScript and Shell with each commit (even if no .scpt or .sh file was changed or added)

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#9

Post by pcmonk » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:59 AM UTC

alexchamberlain wrote: post #7

What is the cause for the correlation between Java and JavaScript?

Probably random noise. Or else because it kind of tracks the arc of github going mainstream, and Java and Javascript are very mainstream.

Re: GitHub Language Trends

#10

Post by jcbrand » Sun, May 04, 2014, 7:12 AM UTC

One of their reasons for the growth of Javascript:

> the JavaScript development philosophy that encourages bundling of dependencies in the same repo as the primary codebase

I wonder how much this is still an issue with the rise of npm, bower and other package managers.