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Thanks for your comment! About your concern: I too think it's strange but they put it clearly in their blog post: "The timestamp used in the equation is norma

by d0vs 15y ago

Thanks for your comment! About your concern: I too think it's strange but they put it clearly in their blog post: "The timestamp used in the equation is normalized from 0 to 1, where 0 is the earliest point in the code base, and 1 is now (where now is when the algorithm was run)." I could do `repo_age = commits[0]["time"] - commits[-1]["time"]` but I'd like to stick to what the blog post says.

Lewisham 15y ago
(I'm the author of the original blog post/algorithm) For Google, this makes sense, although I see now it's a weird idiosyncrasy outside of the Googleplex :) Google has changes all year round, so "now" always represents a day of some changes. The algorithm is run on the entire code base, so now is a perfectly normal spot to go with. It didn't occur to me that really what now represents is "last time of changes". This is a good spot, and I'll put it in the paper I'm writing! Thanks! A reasonable/desirable modification is probably for now to be changed to represent the last change, just like the first change is when the normalization window begins. (0 = time of first change, 1 = time of last change). HTH.
- d0vs 15y ago
  Thanks for clearing that out, I now remember that "50% of the Google codebase changes every month."