3 ms·

The author is absolutely right that theres's a ton of data from languages/open source projects that if analyzed could prove massively useful. But I'm not sure

The author is absolutely right that theres's a ton of data from languages/open source projects that if analyzed could prove massively useful. But I'm not sure that the metrics in the referenced article have much to do with language design. Most of what they are measuring (their conclusion says as much) are people copy pasting files and entire projects. JS by their stats is the worst about this but JS is a language that reduces duplication more than Java (also measured with less copying). Seems to be a social or dev skill issue rather than language design. Honestly most languages have an excellent tool for reuse - the function/method, which isn't used enough to remove all duplication as is. We presented an exhaustive investigation of code cloning in GitHub for four of the most popular object-oriented languages: Java, C++, Python and JavaScript. The amount of file-level duplication is staggering in the four language ecosystems, with the extreme case of JavaScript, where only 6% of the files are original, and the rest are copies of those. The Java ecosystem has the least amount of duplication. These results stand even when ignoring very small files. When delving deeper into the data we observed the presence of files from popular libraries that were copy-included in a large number projects. We also detected cases of reappropriation of entire projects, where developers take over a project without changes. There seemed to be several reasons for this, from abandoned projects, to slightly abusive uses of GitHub in educational contexts. Finally, we studied the JavaScript ecosystem, which turns out to be dominated by Node libraries that are committed to the applications’ repositories. Reading the conclusion again, they're capturing the existence of node_modules/, which has nothing to do with language design.

ulucs 9y ago
Further info about node_modules from the paper Because the JavaScript sample was so heavily (78 out of 80) dominated by Node packages, wehave performed the same analysis again, this time excluding the Node files. This uncovered jQueryin its various versions and parts accounting for more than half of the sample (43), followed froma distance by other popular frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap (12), Angular (7), reveal (4).Language tools such as modernizr, prettify, HTML5Shiv and others were present. We attribute thisgreater diversity to the fact that to keep connections small, many libraries are distributed as asingle file. It is also a testament to the popularity of jQuery which still managed to occupy half ofthe list.

ulucs 9y ago

Further info about node_modules from the paper Because the JavaScript sample was so heavily (78 out of 80) dominated by Node packages, wehave performed the same analysis again, this time excluding the Node files. This uncovered jQueryin its various versions and parts accounting for more than half of the sample (43), followed froma distance by other popular frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap (12), Angular (7), reveal (4).Language tools such as modernizr, prettify, HTML5Shiv and others were present. We attribute thisgreater diversity to the fact that to keep connections small, many libraries are distributed as asingle file. It is also a testament to the popularity of jQuery which still managed to occupy half ofthe list.