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Github: CoffeeScript cracks the top 10 languages

110 points by martyman 14y ago

meanguy 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias I don't think this says much about CoffeeScript, which I use. However I do think it says quite a bit about how GitHub has plenty of room to grow as they make themselves more attractive to a broader market. A very interesting chart would be GitHub account revenue broken down by file extension. Note that I didn't say language, as the real money is in assets, not code.
TrevorBurnham 14y ago
They said it couldn't be done, but CoffeeScript bumped Objective-C down to #11. Of course, I think it's fair to say that there's more Obj-C code than CoffeeScript being written, but less of it is being open-sourced.
- chrisaycock 14y ago
  Yeah, that seems like a good explanation. Obj-C has 85574 questions on StackOverflow, CoffeeScript has 1476. http://stackoverflow.com/tags http://stackoverflow.com/tags
  - qiemem 14y ago
    That could also say something about the languages and the platforms rather than the number of people using them, especially since all of Apple's libraries fall under the category of Obj-C. You're probably right, just wanted to point that's not necessarily a good measure either.
  - chc 14y ago
    I think those numbers also reflect something other than the obvious. There's a huge contingent of…uh…let's just say "differently educated" developers who previously were making some delicious pasta in PHP and now want to build iPhone apps because they heard there's gold in them thar hills. Objective-C is also a lower-level language than CoffeeScript and thus harder to use, especially if you're not used to working in a language where it's possible to free memory early or smash the stack. So CoffeeScript is a very easy language that tends to be used by developers who are experienced in its domain, while Objective-C is a relatively hard language that has gotten a huge influx of rank amateurs in Stack Overflow's lifetime. Thus, the latter gets a disproportionate number of questions. (For credibility's sake: I'm one of the top contributors to the Objective-C tag on Stack Overflow.)
  - focusaurus 14y ago
    Other factors probably at play: Obj-C MUCH older. CoffeeScript designed to be simple and have fewer "bad parts" thus fewer questions. Many problems faced while coding CoffeeScript are actually javascript or DOM or Web questions so you don't tag them with CoffeeScript. StackOverflow isn't overly loving of CoffeeScript, so I often ask my questions using JavaScript even if my source is really CoffeeScript (and again the questions aren't really about CoffeeScript but usually about JavaScript).
  - re_todd 14y ago
    You have to factor in all the newbies that here all this doom and gloom about the job market in the media, and the last tidbit in the news story usually mentions "but there is a lot of growth in iPhone and Android apps". This is probably causing a lot of people new to programming to learn Objective-C, thus many more questions.
    - cageface 14y ago
      It's funny that people still think there's easy money in mobile apps. The competition is getting tougher and the market more glutted every day.
    - Morg 14y ago
      You want newbies ? go javascript. I can't believe I'm reading an argument favoring Obj-C over (any flavor of) js as a noob turf... The simple reason there's disparity is that github is not the center of the world and objC people mostly code for money, that's all there is to it.
      - re_todd 14y ago
        I'm not saying newbies get very far with it.
  - rrreese 14y ago
    Objective C has been in heavy use for a lot longer then CoffeeScript though. CoffeeScript has only been stable for over a year. Objective C has been in use since before the creation of StackOverflow.
- treetrouble 14y ago
  No doubt. This list isn't supposed to be indicative of what's being written in general-- it's about what code is on github.
JoachimSchipper 14y ago
Isn't this simply a category error? C++98 and C++0x aren't separate languages, nor are Python 2.x and 3.x. CoffeeScript has good branding, but is it really its own language?
- Me1000 14y ago
  Of course CoffeeScript is its own language. What kind of requirements do you think a language requires that CoffeeScript doesn't meet?
  - michael_fine 14y ago
    Because it simply compiles down and is executed as Javascript. It doesn't (and can't) change anything but the syntax. Edit: It does add features like pattern matching and list comprehension, and anything can compile down to js, so I guess it is a separate language.
    - tolmasky 14y ago
      By this logic no language is a real language other than JavaScript, since as we've seen, you can make just about anything "simply compile down" to JavaScript. Let me put it another way. If I were to write a separate runtime that directly executed CoffeeScript (without JS as an intermediate step), would you then be satisfied that it is in fact a real language?
      - michael_fine 14y ago
        Now that you say it, and I think about it more, I guess you're right. It does add features like list comprehension and pattern matching, and the compilation really is ambiguous.
        asynchrony 14y ago
        Coffeescript doesn't add pattern matching.
arrowgunz 14y ago
That is so sad. I am not a fan of CoffeeScript. The language is like Ruby and When people try to make one language look like another, I don't like it. I probably would have liked it if the syntax was a bit different. It looks more like a ruby propaganda. Incoming hatred.
- akincisor 14y ago
  Every language is derivative. C++ looks like C. C# looks like Java. Scheme looks like Lisp. It's OK to stand on the shoulders of giants.
- chc 14y ago
  This is the weirdest, least substantial criticism I've ever seen of CoffeeScript. Do you hate C for looking like B? Python for looking like a cross between C and ABC? Haskell for looking like ML? Objective-C for looking like both C and Smalltalk? Almost every mainstream language for pretty strongly resembling ALGOL-68? Heck, Ruby itself was intentionally made to look like Perl. Criticizing a language's syntax is often just an expression of personal preference — but criticizing a language for using syntactic conventions that are familiar and generally well-liked? That just makes no sense.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tjholowaychuk 14y ago
  beware - opinions are not allowed
- kaonashi 14y ago
  posts flamebait predicts flames
- pspeter3 14y ago
  To be honest, CoffeeScript feels a lot more like python than it does Ruby
tolmasky 14y ago
I'm curious whether GitHub includes private repos in these statistics. If not, then I'd be curious how it would change things if they did (not saying they should, just curious to contemplate the difference).
- technoweenie 14y ago
  We include only public repositories in those stats. I ran the numbers across the site, and the rankings don't change much. Javascript and ruby are still at the top, but Objective-C and Coffeescript are 10 and 11.
jashkenas 14y ago
It'd be nice to have someone from GitHub comment on how these rankings are calculated. Raw LOC? Percentage of projects with at least one X language file in them? Percentage of projects that have a plurality of source code in X language?
- michaelficarra 14y ago
  My guess is the latter.
- kibwen 14y ago
  I second this request. Been wondering more about this process ever since I noticed, sometime in January, that Rust (a nascent language with very little use yet) was ranked in the low-20s for language popularity. The problem likely had to do with how the Rust devs registered their language with Github's Linguist[1] project; Rust's units of compilation ("crates") have the .rc extension, and Github must have taken this to mean that every project with a .rc file (notably many Android-specific projects) contained Rust code. The Rust devs have since revoked that association from Linguist[2], but since Github takes a while to reevaluate a project's language breakdown, the language's popularity ranking on Github is still artificially inflated (sitting at #31 at the moment). [1] https://github.com/github/linguist https://github.com/github/linguist [2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1512 https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1512
  - Tobu 14y ago
    .rc files don't dominate a project in file count or SLOC, so I think the answer to jashkenas' question is something like this: pop[lang] = avg(loc(proj, lang) / loc(proj) for proj in projects)
    - kibwen 14y ago
      That depends on the project: https://github.com/CM7-GB/android_device_motorola_droid2we https://github.com/CM7-GB/android_device_motorola_droid2we Note the language breakdown, under the Graphs tab. But yes, it all hinges on how Github measures popularity. For one, I'm curious how forked repositories are counted; if I have a 100kloc Blub project and it gets forked 100 times, does Github count that as 100,000 or 10,000,000 lines of Blub?
Alex3917 14y ago
Is this just for coffeescript proper or are they counting all the variants of coffeescript as well?
- Tobu 14y ago
  It needs to have the .coffee extension (or two variants): https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/languages.yml#L232 https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...
timr 14y ago
I don't get it. I'm in the process of ripping the last bit of coffeescript out of our code. The marginal benefits of the language don't exceed the costs of having another build dependency, and another syntax to understand. For daily work, I already have to switch contexts between Javascript, CSS, SCSS, HTML, rHTML, HAML and Ruby (not to mention other tools like Bash, Rake, etc., along with API knowledge like the Rails API, jQuery, and all of the various un- or poorly-documented gems). Ultimately, it's a huge mental burden. Every new thing is a new thing that someone has to understand to be productive. To justify the extra mental cost of another piece of technology, it has to do something pretty amazing. A minor syntactical transformation of javascript just doesn't cut it.
- benatkin 14y ago
  It's more expressive. It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080. Sure, you can do all the things you can normally do with the 24" monitor that you could do with the 19" monitor, but it isn't as pleasant or efficient. The place it best fits in right now is for in-house software development at a place with a low turnover of developers. 37signals has a very low turnover, so it shouldn't be surprising that it fits them well. That mental burden is low, compared with the time saved using it.
  - timr 14y ago
    "It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080." Ehh....I think you're overstating it, but to each their own. To make the comparison fair, you'd have to turn it into something more obtrusive: it's like going from a 19" monitor to a 20" monitor that's driven by one of those $300 USB video cards that gets really hot and eats up desk space and might occasionally cause RFI problems with my wireless mouse. Or more directly, it's like going from Ruby to Python, or vice-versa, by using a tool that converts one to the other. They're different, and they have different syntactical features, but the annoyances of either language balance the benefits to the extent that I can't confidently exclaim that one is better. And the auto-generation step would just cause pain. The critical difference here is that to use coffeescript, I have to add another (IMNSHO) annoying step to my build process. Another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs. Another sprocket that can come unglued and bork my app at any time. No thanks. I'll stick with my current complexity level, and write my list comprehensions as loops.
jashkenas 14y ago
Whoops -- cancel the party folks. Apparently the rankings just count the percentage of GitHub repos with any amount of the language in it. I bet CoffeeScript's recent rise has a lot to do with a handful of auto-generated-by-default files in Rails projects. Source: https://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/205783659830198273 https://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/205783659830198273
DigitalSea 14y ago
Ugh, Coffeescript. Javascript doesn't need any further abstraction, we already have jQuery which made everyone's lives easier but at the same time has created a new-breed of developers who only know jQuery and not Javascript itself. This is the exact same thing, people will know Coffeescript if it takes off further in popularity but won't know Javascript.
klapinat0r 14y ago
Having coded in javascript for 4 or so years, and a recent love for NodeJS in a couple of internal projects, I'm a bit torn between giving coffee a proper go or not. Can any one employee give a gist of how used it is in production? From what I've seen I would love to use coffee (I've actually used coffee in reverse, to tweak out a javascript function), but I'm wondering if I'd be lowering my productivity. What I mean by that is, if I wrote coffeescript, but everyone else worked in javascript (or compiled coffee), then it'd be silly of me to continue doing so. Similarly I've watched a lot of node module development over the past year, and only once I've come across a module written in coffee. I do of course realize NodeJS in itself is not "very" widespread yet, but are there any node users who can shed some light on the possible future of coffee in node?
- danneu 14y ago
  Why are you so cautious to "give it a proper go"? It's not a big mental investment.
- Morg 14y ago
  Hopefully nodeJs will die within a year or two. Apart from that, I believe you should try coffeescript or any language you become interested in, it's a very way to keep on improving, opens your mind to different paradigms too.

110 points by martyman 14y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias I don't think this says much about CoffeeScript, which I use. However I do think it says quite a bit about how GitHub has plenty of room to grow as they make themselves more attractive to a broader market. A very interesting chart would be GitHub account revenue broken down by file extension. Note that I didn't say language, as the real money is in assets, not code.

TrevorBurnham 14y ago

They said it couldn't be done, but CoffeeScript bumped Objective-C down to #11. Of course, I think it's fair to say that there's more Obj-C code than CoffeeScript being written, but less of it is being open-sourced.

chrisaycock 14y ago
Yeah, that seems like a good explanation. Obj-C has 85574 questions on StackOverflow, CoffeeScript has 1476. http://stackoverflow.com/tags http://stackoverflow.com/tags
- qiemem 14y ago
  That could also say something about the languages and the platforms rather than the number of people using them, especially since all of Apple's libraries fall under the category of Obj-C. You're probably right, just wanted to point that's not necessarily a good measure either.
- chc 14y ago
  I think those numbers also reflect something other than the obvious. There's a huge contingent of…uh…let's just say "differently educated" developers who previously were making some delicious pasta in PHP and now want to build iPhone apps because they heard there's gold in them thar hills. Objective-C is also a lower-level language than CoffeeScript and thus harder to use, especially if you're not used to working in a language where it's possible to free memory early or smash the stack. So CoffeeScript is a very easy language that tends to be used by developers who are experienced in its domain, while Objective-C is a relatively hard language that has gotten a huge influx of rank amateurs in Stack Overflow's lifetime. Thus, the latter gets a disproportionate number of questions. (For credibility's sake: I'm one of the top contributors to the Objective-C tag on Stack Overflow.)
- focusaurus 14y ago
  Other factors probably at play: Obj-C MUCH older. CoffeeScript designed to be simple and have fewer "bad parts" thus fewer questions. Many problems faced while coding CoffeeScript are actually javascript or DOM or Web questions so you don't tag them with CoffeeScript. StackOverflow isn't overly loving of CoffeeScript, so I often ask my questions using JavaScript even if my source is really CoffeeScript (and again the questions aren't really about CoffeeScript but usually about JavaScript).
- re_todd 14y ago
  You have to factor in all the newbies that here all this doom and gloom about the job market in the media, and the last tidbit in the news story usually mentions "but there is a lot of growth in iPhone and Android apps". This is probably causing a lot of people new to programming to learn Objective-C, thus many more questions.
  - cageface 14y ago
    It's funny that people still think there's easy money in mobile apps. The competition is getting tougher and the market more glutted every day.
  - Morg 14y ago
    You want newbies ? go javascript. I can't believe I'm reading an argument favoring Obj-C over (any flavor of) js as a noob turf... The simple reason there's disparity is that github is not the center of the world and objC people mostly code for money, that's all there is to it.
    - re_todd 14y ago
      I'm not saying newbies get very far with it.
- rrreese 14y ago
  Objective C has been in heavy use for a lot longer then CoffeeScript though. CoffeeScript has only been stable for over a year. Objective C has been in use since before the creation of StackOverflow.
treetrouble 14y ago
No doubt. This list isn't supposed to be indicative of what's being written in general-- it's about what code is on github.

JoachimSchipper 14y ago

Isn't this simply a category error? C++98 and C++0x aren't separate languages, nor are Python 2.x and 3.x. CoffeeScript has good branding, but is it really its own language?

Me1000 14y ago
Of course CoffeeScript is its own language. What kind of requirements do you think a language requires that CoffeeScript doesn't meet?
- michael_fine 14y ago
  Because it simply compiles down and is executed as Javascript. It doesn't (and can't) change anything but the syntax. Edit: It does add features like pattern matching and list comprehension, and anything can compile down to js, so I guess it is a separate language.
  - tolmasky 14y ago
    By this logic no language is a real language other than JavaScript, since as we've seen, you can make just about anything "simply compile down" to JavaScript. Let me put it another way. If I were to write a separate runtime that directly executed CoffeeScript (without JS as an intermediate step), would you then be satisfied that it is in fact a real language?
    - michael_fine 14y ago
      Now that you say it, and I think about it more, I guess you're right. It does add features like list comprehension and pattern matching, and the compilation really is ambiguous.
      - asynchrony 14y ago
        Coffeescript doesn't add pattern matching.

arrowgunz 14y ago

That is so sad. I am not a fan of CoffeeScript. The language is like Ruby and When people try to make one language look like another, I don't like it. I probably would have liked it if the syntax was a bit different. It looks more like a ruby propaganda. Incoming hatred.

akincisor 14y ago
Every language is derivative. C++ looks like C. C# looks like Java. Scheme looks like Lisp. It's OK to stand on the shoulders of giants.
chc 14y ago
This is the weirdest, least substantial criticism I've ever seen of CoffeeScript. Do you hate C for looking like B? Python for looking like a cross between C and ABC? Haskell for looking like ML? Objective-C for looking like both C and Smalltalk? Almost every mainstream language for pretty strongly resembling ALGOL-68? Heck, Ruby itself was intentionally made to look like Perl. Criticizing a language's syntax is often just an expression of personal preference — but criticizing a language for using syntactic conventions that are familiar and generally well-liked? That just makes no sense.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tjholowaychuk 14y ago
beware - opinions are not allowed
kaonashi 14y ago
posts flamebait predicts flames
pspeter3 14y ago
To be honest, CoffeeScript feels a lot more like python than it does Ruby

tolmasky 14y ago

I'm curious whether GitHub includes private repos in these statistics. If not, then I'd be curious how it would change things if they did (not saying they should, just curious to contemplate the difference).

technoweenie 14y ago
We include only public repositories in those stats. I ran the numbers across the site, and the rankings don't change much. Javascript and ruby are still at the top, but Objective-C and Coffeescript are 10 and 11.

jashkenas 14y ago

It'd be nice to have someone from GitHub comment on how these rankings are calculated. Raw LOC? Percentage of projects with at least one X language file in them? Percentage of projects that have a plurality of source code in X language?

michaelficarra 14y ago
My guess is the latter.
kibwen 14y ago
I second this request. Been wondering more about this process ever since I noticed, sometime in January, that Rust (a nascent language with very little use yet) was ranked in the low-20s for language popularity. The problem likely had to do with how the Rust devs registered their language with Github's Linguist[1] project; Rust's units of compilation ("crates") have the .rc extension, and Github must have taken this to mean that every project with a .rc file (notably many Android-specific projects) contained Rust code. The Rust devs have since revoked that association from Linguist[2], but since Github takes a while to reevaluate a project's language breakdown, the language's popularity ranking on Github is still artificially inflated (sitting at #31 at the moment). [1] https://github.com/github/linguist https://github.com/github/linguist [2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1512 https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1512
- Tobu 14y ago
  .rc files don't dominate a project in file count or SLOC, so I think the answer to jashkenas' question is something like this: pop[lang] = avg(loc(proj, lang) / loc(proj) for proj in projects)
  - kibwen 14y ago
    That depends on the project: https://github.com/CM7-GB/android_device_motorola_droid2we https://github.com/CM7-GB/android_device_motorola_droid2we Note the language breakdown, under the Graphs tab. But yes, it all hinges on how Github measures popularity. For one, I'm curious how forked repositories are counted; if I have a 100kloc Blub project and it gets forked 100 times, does Github count that as 100,000 or 10,000,000 lines of Blub?

Alex3917 14y ago

Is this just for coffeescript proper or are they counting all the variants of coffeescript as well?

Tobu 14y ago
It needs to have the .coffee extension (or two variants): https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/languages.yml#L232 https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...

timr 14y ago

I don't get it. I'm in the process of ripping the last bit of coffeescript out of our code. The marginal benefits of the language don't exceed the costs of having another build dependency, and another syntax to understand. For daily work, I already have to switch contexts between Javascript, CSS, SCSS, HTML, rHTML, HAML and Ruby (not to mention other tools like Bash, Rake, etc., along with API knowledge like the Rails API, jQuery, and all of the various un- or poorly-documented gems). Ultimately, it's a huge mental burden. Every new thing is a new thing that someone has to understand to be productive. To justify the extra mental cost of another piece of technology, it has to do something pretty amazing. A minor syntactical transformation of javascript just doesn't cut it.

benatkin 14y ago
It's more expressive. It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080. Sure, you can do all the things you can normally do with the 24" monitor that you could do with the 19" monitor, but it isn't as pleasant or efficient. The place it best fits in right now is for in-house software development at a place with a low turnover of developers. 37signals has a very low turnover, so it shouldn't be surprising that it fits them well. That mental burden is low, compared with the time saved using it.
- timr 14y ago
  "It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080." Ehh....I think you're overstating it, but to each their own. To make the comparison fair, you'd have to turn it into something more obtrusive: it's like going from a 19" monitor to a 20" monitor that's driven by one of those $300 USB video cards that gets really hot and eats up desk space and might occasionally cause RFI problems with my wireless mouse. Or more directly, it's like going from Ruby to Python, or vice-versa, by using a tool that converts one to the other. They're different, and they have different syntactical features, but the annoyances of either language balance the benefits to the extent that I can't confidently exclaim that one is better. And the auto-generation step would just cause pain. The critical difference here is that to use coffeescript, I have to add another (IMNSHO) annoying step to my build process. Another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs. Another sprocket that can come unglued and bork my app at any time. No thanks. I'll stick with my current complexity level, and write my list comprehensions as loops.

jashkenas 14y ago

Whoops -- cancel the party folks. Apparently the rankings just count the percentage of GitHub repos with any amount of the language in it. I bet CoffeeScript's recent rise has a lot to do with a handful of auto-generated-by-default files in Rails projects. Source: https://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/205783659830198273 https://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/205783659830198273

DigitalSea 14y ago

Ugh, Coffeescript. Javascript doesn't need any further abstraction, we already have jQuery which made everyone's lives easier but at the same time has created a new-breed of developers who only know jQuery and not Javascript itself. This is the exact same thing, people will know Coffeescript if it takes off further in popularity but won't know Javascript.

klapinat0r 14y ago

Having coded in javascript for 4 or so years, and a recent love for NodeJS in a couple of internal projects, I'm a bit torn between giving coffee a proper go or not. Can any one employee give a gist of how used it is in production? From what I've seen I would love to use coffee (I've actually used coffee in reverse, to tweak out a javascript function), but I'm wondering if I'd be lowering my productivity. What I mean by that is, if I wrote coffeescript, but everyone else worked in javascript (or compiled coffee), then it'd be silly of me to continue doing so. Similarly I've watched a lot of node module development over the past year, and only once I've come across a module written in coffee. I do of course realize NodeJS in itself is not "very" widespread yet, but are there any node users who can shed some light on the possible future of coffee in node?

danneu 14y ago
Why are you so cautious to "give it a proper go"? It's not a big mental investment.
Morg 14y ago
Hopefully nodeJs will die within a year or two. Apart from that, I believe you should try coffeescript or any language you become interested in, it's a very way to keep on improving, opens your mind to different paradigms too.