3 ms·

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

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 2.0 coming out soon, but assumed that that would make it 'popular' again.

Rexxar 4y ago
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.
hipmanbro 4y ago
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.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  There has to be something to contribute to first -- i.e., new features or bug fixes. Once software reaches a level of stability, there aren't new features to be built, or bugs to be fixed. That doesn't mean there aren't contributors out there, willing to contribute to something new.
userbinator 4y ago
Completely agree. This is like measuring productivity by lines of code written.
klodolph 4y ago
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.

3 ms·

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

by withinboredom 4y ago

Rexxar 4y ago
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.
hipmanbro 4y ago
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.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  There has to be something to contribute to first -- i.e., new features or bug fixes. Once software reaches a level of stability, there aren't new features to be built, or bugs to be fixed. That doesn't mean there aren't contributors out there, willing to contribute to something new.
userbinator 4y ago
Completely agree. This is like measuring productivity by lines of code written.
klodolph 4y ago
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.