9 ms·

NodeJS is now the most popular repository on Github

98 points by diamondhead 15y ago

ryanfitz 15y ago
Looking at that listing the more amazing stat is that twitter bootstrap is #3. That was just released a few months ago and is "simply" an html ui framework. I think this highlights that over anything else, what most developers really need is a solid web ui to get started with.
- ergo14 15y ago
  It just shows that people hype on everything and follow like sheep - doesn't matter if they need particular project or not. Developers are no exception it seems...
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    At the same time, it also shows that developers or hackers are no different that consultants that keep selling new methodologies. Our products are new programming languages, new patterns, new programming paradigm.
    - ergo14 15y ago
      What's the name of last thing you sold?
      - hello_moto 15y ago
        scalable architecture utilizing event-driven non-blocking I/O
        ergo14 15y ago
        anything open source? id love to see link to it - ive recently wrote my own cometd server with gevent and im looking for more examples ;-)
  - grillz 15y ago
    I don't think that is what it shows at all. People follow the projects they find interesting or will need to use in the future. This doesn't make it "The most popular thing on the internet", but it does show that people find it useful and fills a need they had. Your comment was really unhelpful and rude.
- phillmv 15y ago
  Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but Bootstrap is also relatively unique. We've had css frameworks before, but they were usually concerned with letting you position things along a grid structure. The great thing about Bootstrap is that it provides you with a full complement of UI "widgets" that look reasonably good, filled in a page chocked full of examples. We have a good designer on staff and so we were slowly starting to build something along these lines, but standardizing on Bootstrap has saved such enormous quantities of time I can't recommend it enough. I've used it on two or three projects already and it makes me happy inside.
  - bergie 15y ago
    Yep, we also use Bootstrap quite heavily for the web-based business apps we build for our clients. Makes it easy to build standardized and pretty interfaces. Previously we were following jQuery UI themes, but Bootstrap is better in that it provides very nice defaults for many different types of content.
    - phillmv 15y ago
      100% of my jquery-ui experience can be summed up with "I don't know why this is so hard and why is this so ugly? Ugh, I just want this plugin to work already." Bootstrap on the other hand is a great way to go from 0 to "For something that a developer slapped together this looks really clean and composed" in no time flat.
bascule 15y ago
Just to show how Github watchers correlate to real-world popularity, my now-defunct programming language Reia is the #3 most watched Erlang project on Github, ahead of projects like Riak and RabbitMQ: https://github.com/languages/erlang https://github.com/languages/erlang
- wslh 15y ago
  Also we can compare with StackOverflow tags followers: - C# 22.2K followers - NodeJS 2.2K followers
  - blacksmythe 15y ago
    I think having 10% as many StackOverflow followers as for C# is a big win for an emerging technology.
    - skrebbel 15y ago
      also, it would make more sense to compare node to ASP.NET.
senthilnayagam 15y ago
congrats to nodejs , it is the shiny new thing, but it is still not there yet rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later in terms of forks nodejs is half the popularity of rails, but I wish more contributors for nodejs
- damncabbage 15y ago
  rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later Aha! So is that why there are so many accounts that just contain forked repositories with no further commits? (I suppose it was a heavy form of bookmarking something.)
  - senthilnayagam 15y ago
    Git workflow is evolving, and github in its forefront If you want to compare on contributors Rails would again beat most open source projects , I remember seeing that number well above 1000
    - vijaydev 15y ago
      Last count: 2155 as per http://contributors.rubyonrails.org http://contributors.rubyonrails.org :)
      - spooneybarger 15y ago
        Some of us on that list haven't contributed in a really long time. My contributions for example were pre rails 1.0 days so my part of that number isn't really meaningful to current popularity.
  - jurre 15y ago
    I often fork repos to remind myself that I want to contribute to it, but then don't find the time to get started on it. I can imagine there being more people doing that.
skrebbel 15y ago
Call me a cynic, but how is this relevant? Everybody knows that Node is popular. It's like adding "Rihanna scores #1 hit record" as a news item.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  I find the example fits nicely. Rihanna and Node. FWIW, I think Node is a great way to teach, explore, and learn JavaScript without the browser. It helps me learn modern JS techniques quickly. But Node powering my web-server? Like Rihanna... PS: Check out this free online book: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ http://eloquentjavascript.net/ big props to the author. He's done a great job teaching modern JS.
  - phillmv 15y ago
    You are being non sensical. Does Rihanna respond to HTTP verbs? I like Node insofar as it distracts hate away from the Ruby community, but c'mon now.
    - hello_moto 15y ago
      C'mon what? No, Rihanna does not respond to HTTP verbs. But then again, that's what young teens/early adults listen these days with less appreciation of music. Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Rihanna. C'mon now. What has come to the music industry? I thank Ted Dziuba for knocking the wind out of Node a bit. It puts some perspective and questions to a lot of people's head when it comes to how to use Node.js. Props to him for taking time explaining the important bits. Rails community was off the chart when it comes to cockiness back then so I suppose it deserves the hate.
      - phillmv 15y ago
        1. Thirty years ago, this dutch novelty pop act charted #1 in the US Billboard charts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bGQ1-Gmoso http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bGQ1-Gmoso (watching it now is kind of great, actually) 2. In much the same way I tire of Node people claiming it's The Best Thing Ever because it has the shiniest Cargo[1] I also can't stand people who hate things purely because other people like it. You hate them because they have the shiniest Cargo. I'm sure it has a purpose and it solves problems. I'd much prefer to discuss its technical merits, though. (Note: this was not an invitation to discuss its technical merits in this thread) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
muppetman 15y ago
Silverlight was very popular when it was first released too.
- dchest 15y ago
  Are you sure?
- coreyrecvlohe 15y ago
  Silverlight was popular? When did this happen...
- jemfinch 15y ago
  This is a poor quality comment, not worth posting here.
lucian1900 15y ago
I think this is a little sad. Pragmatically, NodeJS is great. But the only reason it's popular is because browsers only run one (deeply flawed) language.
- maxwell 15y ago
  Remind me which existing language(s) aren't deeply flawed?
  - jjm 15y ago
    Yeah seriously. The be all end all of languages has yet to arrive. Language and programming is an art, not some maximist metric. The Mona lisa is as flawed as JavaScript and every other language that exist.
terrellm 15y ago
I wonder how much of the popularity is because popularity was perhaps a goal of some of the NodeJS advocates. Recently I stumbled on http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com, which in the source at https://github.com/mmalecki/nodejs-vs-ror/blob/master/public/index.html#L24 https://github.com/mmalecki/nodejs-vs-ror/blob/master/public... seems to imply beating Rails follow count was a goal. I'm not sure where I found the link but probably here on HN. I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub." I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.
- mmalecki 15y ago
  It's my project and it's purpose wasn't to beat Rails follow count, really. As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit. It's also my first project using bootstrap.css. It was a fun thing to hack on. Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.

98 points by diamondhead 15y ago

Looking at that listing the more amazing stat is that twitter bootstrap is #3. That was just released a few months ago and is "simply" an html ui framework. I think this highlights that over anything else, what most developers really need is a solid web ui to get started with.

ergo14 15y ago
It just shows that people hype on everything and follow like sheep - doesn't matter if they need particular project or not. Developers are no exception it seems...
- hello_moto 15y ago
  At the same time, it also shows that developers or hackers are no different that consultants that keep selling new methodologies. Our products are new programming languages, new patterns, new programming paradigm.
  - ergo14 15y ago
    What's the name of last thing you sold?
    - hello_moto 15y ago
      scalable architecture utilizing event-driven non-blocking I/O
      - ergo14 15y ago
        anything open source? id love to see link to it - ive recently wrote my own cometd server with gevent and im looking for more examples ;-)
- grillz 15y ago
  I don't think that is what it shows at all. People follow the projects they find interesting or will need to use in the future. This doesn't make it "The most popular thing on the internet", but it does show that people find it useful and fills a need they had. Your comment was really unhelpful and rude.
phillmv 15y ago
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but Bootstrap is also relatively unique. We've had css frameworks before, but they were usually concerned with letting you position things along a grid structure. The great thing about Bootstrap is that it provides you with a full complement of UI "widgets" that look reasonably good, filled in a page chocked full of examples. We have a good designer on staff and so we were slowly starting to build something along these lines, but standardizing on Bootstrap has saved such enormous quantities of time I can't recommend it enough. I've used it on two or three projects already and it makes me happy inside.
- bergie 15y ago
  Yep, we also use Bootstrap quite heavily for the web-based business apps we build for our clients. Makes it easy to build standardized and pretty interfaces. Previously we were following jQuery UI themes, but Bootstrap is better in that it provides very nice defaults for many different types of content.
  - phillmv 15y ago
    100% of my jquery-ui experience can be summed up with "I don't know why this is so hard and why is this so ugly? Ugh, I just want this plugin to work already." Bootstrap on the other hand is a great way to go from 0 to "For something that a developer slapped together this looks really clean and composed" in no time flat.

bascule 15y ago

Just to show how Github watchers correlate to real-world popularity, my now-defunct programming language Reia is the #3 most watched Erlang project on Github, ahead of projects like Riak and RabbitMQ: https://github.com/languages/erlang https://github.com/languages/erlang

wslh 15y ago
Also we can compare with StackOverflow tags followers: - C# 22.2K followers - NodeJS 2.2K followers
- blacksmythe 15y ago
  I think having 10% as many StackOverflow followers as for C# is a big win for an emerging technology.
  - skrebbel 15y ago
    also, it would make more sense to compare node to ASP.NET.

senthilnayagam 15y ago

congrats to nodejs , it is the shiny new thing, but it is still not there yet rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later in terms of forks nodejs is half the popularity of rails, but I wish more contributors for nodejs

damncabbage 15y ago
rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later Aha! So is that why there are so many accounts that just contain forked repositories with no further commits? (I suppose it was a heavy form of bookmarking something.)
- senthilnayagam 15y ago
  Git workflow is evolving, and github in its forefront If you want to compare on contributors Rails would again beat most open source projects , I remember seeing that number well above 1000
  - vijaydev 15y ago
    Last count: 2155 as per http://contributors.rubyonrails.org http://contributors.rubyonrails.org :)
    - spooneybarger 15y ago
      Some of us on that list haven't contributed in a really long time. My contributions for example were pre rails 1.0 days so my part of that number isn't really meaningful to current popularity.
- jurre 15y ago
  I often fork repos to remind myself that I want to contribute to it, but then don't find the time to get started on it. I can imagine there being more people doing that.

skrebbel 15y ago

Call me a cynic, but how is this relevant? Everybody knows that Node is popular. It's like adding "Rihanna scores #1 hit record" as a news item.

hello_moto 15y ago
I find the example fits nicely. Rihanna and Node. FWIW, I think Node is a great way to teach, explore, and learn JavaScript without the browser. It helps me learn modern JS techniques quickly. But Node powering my web-server? Like Rihanna... PS: Check out this free online book: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ http://eloquentjavascript.net/ big props to the author. He's done a great job teaching modern JS.
- phillmv 15y ago
  You are being non sensical. Does Rihanna respond to HTTP verbs? I like Node insofar as it distracts hate away from the Ruby community, but c'mon now.
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    C'mon what? No, Rihanna does not respond to HTTP verbs. But then again, that's what young teens/early adults listen these days with less appreciation of music. Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Rihanna. C'mon now. What has come to the music industry? I thank Ted Dziuba for knocking the wind out of Node a bit. It puts some perspective and questions to a lot of people's head when it comes to how to use Node.js. Props to him for taking time explaining the important bits. Rails community was off the chart when it comes to cockiness back then so I suppose it deserves the hate.
    - phillmv 15y ago
      1. Thirty years ago, this dutch novelty pop act charted #1 in the US Billboard charts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bGQ1-Gmoso http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bGQ1-Gmoso (watching it now is kind of great, actually) 2. In much the same way I tire of Node people claiming it's The Best Thing Ever because it has the shiniest Cargo[1] I also can't stand people who hate things purely because other people like it. You hate them because they have the shiniest Cargo. I'm sure it has a purpose and it solves problems. I'd much prefer to discuss its technical merits, though. (Note: this was not an invitation to discuss its technical merits in this thread) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

muppetman 15y ago

Silverlight was very popular when it was first released too.

dchest 15y ago
Are you sure?
coreyrecvlohe 15y ago
Silverlight was popular? When did this happen...
jemfinch 15y ago
This is a poor quality comment, not worth posting here.

lucian1900 15y ago

I think this is a little sad. Pragmatically, NodeJS is great. But the only reason it's popular is because browsers only run one (deeply flawed) language.

maxwell 15y ago
Remind me which existing language(s) aren't deeply flawed?
- jjm 15y ago
  Yeah seriously. The be all end all of languages has yet to arrive. Language and programming is an art, not some maximist metric. The Mona lisa is as flawed as JavaScript and every other language that exist.

terrellm 15y ago

I wonder how much of the popularity is because popularity was perhaps a goal of some of the NodeJS advocates. Recently I stumbled on http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com, which in the source at https://github.com/mmalecki/nodejs-vs-ror/blob/master/public/index.html#L24 https://github.com/mmalecki/nodejs-vs-ror/blob/master/public... seems to imply beating Rails follow count was a goal. I'm not sure where I found the link but probably here on HN. I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub." I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.

mmalecki 15y ago
It's my project and it's purpose wasn't to beat Rails follow count, really. As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit. It's also my first project using bootstrap.css. It was a fun thing to hack on. Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.