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Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

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Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#21

Post by Rexxar »

withinboredom wrote: post #12

I ... don't think this is a good metric for 'popularity' but rather a good metric for stability/volatility. I would say that from working on a JS project, it's volatile af. You can use a package that will be abandoned tomorrow and you have no idea. Meanwhile, the languages near the "bottom" are quite stable languages to work in (as well as a pleasure). They even /almost/ noticed it themselves when mentioning golang 2…

A ratio between the number of lines of codes of all those projects and number of pull request could be interesting to measure this volatility.

Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#22

Post by hipmanbro »

withinboredom wrote: post #12

I ... don't think this is a good metric for 'popularity' but rather a good metric for stability/volatility. I would say that from working on a JS project, it's volatile af. You can use a package that will be abandoned tomorrow and you have no idea. Meanwhile, the languages near the "bottom" are quite stable languages to work in (as well as a pleasure). They even /almost/ noticed it themselves when mentioning golang 2…

It's a good proxy for both. Both popularity and volatility have misleading statistical failure modes if measured purely by pull requests.

The author did narrow it down into what it mostly accurate represents though:

> Nevertheless, in my view, the number of pull requests is an important indicator of how much people are willing and capable of contributing to your software in the open source domain.

Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#24

Post by bob1029 »

oaiey wrote: post #8

Lovely last sentence: believing c# being an underrated language. Very true, also public pull request are not friendly to dark matter enterprise software :)

> also public pull request are not friendly to dark matter enterprise software

Exactly - if you included my organization's private scope alone (an org of ~10 people), there would be 90 additional repositories and ~1.5k PRs/yr worth of C# action available to pad the stats.

Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#26

Post by Someone »

dale_glass wrote: post #4
jrockway wrote: post #3

Clicking through to the underlying data, it seems that 2% of all code is written in Nix. I doubt that is the current state of the industry. For example, I doubt that 2% of programming jobs are for Nix codebases. For that reason, I am consuming a very large salt crystal alongside this information.

Better than TIOBE at least, which seems to have gathered a huge amount of popularity for no good reason. Their metric is just to search for "$LANG programming" in various engines, then assign arbitrary weights depending on the search engine used. It doesn't really measure anything, and has already been gamed intentionally, since it's so simple. Every metric is going to have its pitfalls, but at least this one seems t…

> It doesn't really measure anything, and has already been gamed intentionally, since it's so simple.

If you replace “has already been” by “can be”, I think all of that applies to this, too.

Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#27

Post by bob1029 »

nimbix wrote: post #13
oaiey wrote: post #8

Lovely last sentence: believing c# being an underrated language. Very true, also public pull request are not friendly to dark matter enterprise software :)

I recently got into c# and it seems really nice, but the "customs and traditions" of the dotNet world horrify me (eg: never write a function when you can write three classes instead)

You can actually write an entire, complex C# application without using a single class via top-level statements. Named tuples make it easy to wire together functions without invoking the full OO type system.

Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#28

Post by userbinator »

withinboredom wrote: post #12

I ... don't think this is a good metric for 'popularity' but rather a good metric for stability/volatility. I would say that from working on a JS project, it's volatile af. You can use a package that will be abandoned tomorrow and you have no idea. Meanwhile, the languages near the "bottom" are quite stable languages to work in (as well as a pleasure). They even /almost/ noticed it themselves when mentioning golang 2…

Completely agree. This is like measuring productivity by lines of code written.

Re: Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

#30

Post by klodolph »

withinboredom wrote: post #12

I ... don't think this is a good metric for 'popularity' but rather a good metric for stability/volatility. I would say that from working on a JS project, it's volatile af. You can use a package that will be abandoned tomorrow and you have no idea. Meanwhile, the languages near the "bottom" are quite stable languages to work in (as well as a pleasure). They even /almost/ noticed it themselves when mentioning golang 2…

I think this is a bad metric for stability/volatility. It’s just one way to measure public activity. I don’t think it’s a good proxy for any of the things we actually want to measure, except maybe the likelihood that we can find collaborators for our project in language X who are willing to make pull requests.
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