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GitHut – Programming Languages on GitHub

406 points by jrslv 12y ago

gamesbrainiac 12y ago
Any new change that is of particular interest? I believe this page has been on HN before.
- Retr0spectrum 12y ago
  I only had a brief look, but I find the recent decline of Ruby quite interesting.
  - kcorbitt 12y ago
    like V-2's top-level comment explains, there are lots of ways to interpret these statistics and it's easy to jump to false conclusions if you don't take the time to look for context. In Ruby's case, the total number of repositories on Github has continually increased -- it's just that since it was such a huge part of Github's early user base (the Rails community was probably the first big adopter of Github, which makes sense since Github itself is written in Rails) percentage-wise it has dropped significantly as more communities adopt Github.
    - Touche 12y ago
      I think he's referring to the number of repositories (which is not a percentage of total) is pretty much flat in the last year.
V-2 12y ago
It's what I call an "AHA" piece of statistics. Lots of data right there, and nicely visualised at that, only what it actually means is unfathomable without knowing any broader context. For instance: C++ has the greatest number of opened issues per repository, then comes Rust, then Scala. All right. Does it indicate that they're more tricky than others and hence more bug reports? Or perhaps that projects written in these languages are under more intense scrutiny? Or that people watching these repositories are just more eager to step up and file an issue instead of sulking in silence (a trait of programming culture surrounding these languages)? And so on, and so on. Or it could be one in case of C++, another in case of Rust - since they differ under so many aspects. Wide field for wildest speculations, but no meaningful correlations identified.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  Rust is one of the heavier users of Issues. I've started a pretty huge re categorization and triage effort, and when I started, we had around 2200 open. Earlier today I got us to 1899. Part of this is that we tracked things like 'it would be nice to have a library to do things like X,' and in preparation for 1.0, we're moving those over to our RFC repo instead, so that the main project has only bugs and internal enhancements.
  - V-2 12y ago
    Yes, I imagine, because it's a relatively new language. In case of other ones the reasons are probably of entirely different nature.
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    ... I guess I should also mention that not all of them are these kinds of issues, there's also lots of stuff, like in any tracker, that got fixed somewhere, but the issue was never closed. Or where a library that used to exist no longer does. Etc. Triage is drudge work, but really valuable for any big project.
- nly 12y ago
  > C++ has the greatest number of opened issues per repository, then comes Rust, then Scala. All right. > Does it indicate that they're more tricky than others and hence more bug reports? They're all static languages. In fact, so are C# and Java (the next two of the top 5). Two of these (C++ and Rust) are also in the top 5 for pushes per repo. C++ being top overall. Imho, some of these stats needs to be scaled with respect to LOC. The push/issue ratio might be good as well.
- burntsushi 12y ago
  Yes, context is key! In addition to what steveklabnik said about Rust, the other interesting bit of context is that the deluge of breaking changes[1] has resulted in a very interesting phenomenon: everyone chips in and submits PRs to library dependencies that haven't been updated by their authors yet. The pace is so fast that most of the time, in my case, it's just a matter of "I haven't gotten home from work yet and there are already 3 PRs against my repos with fixes for the latest Rust nightly." As a result, many of my Rust projects have an oddly disproportionate number of contributors/pull requests relative to other projects I have that are more popular. [1] - Breaking changes have simmered down a lot in the last few weeks. We still have one more semi-big one in front of us, but hopefully smooth sailing from there...
krat0sprakhar 12y ago
Looks like 1995 was a great year for programming languages - PHP, Java, Javascript and Ruby were released!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - masklinn 12y ago
    You mean older. Python's initial release predates Java's by 4 years (although its v1.0 was only in 1994). More frustratingly, Haskell is older than both.
    - thu 12y ago
      I wonder how many man-month or how much money was put into GHC vs. cpython.
    - dukerutledge 12y ago
      Yeah, but you couldn't actually write anything useful in Haskell at that time.
  - doctorstupid 12y ago
    Perhaps you meant older?
- V-2 12y ago
  You missed "but" after "PHP" ;) </trolling off>
  - masklinn 12y ago
    The whole comment can be read as both straight or sarcastic, really.
- Argorak 12y ago
  Ruby's development started in 1993 (February 24, to be exact). First full release was 1995 (December 21, that one I had to look up :)). This is very interesting in my opinion: whenever someone asks why one of those languages doesn't do $featureA "like Java", you can just reply: "because Java wasn't a thing back then".
droob 12y ago
This is just _public_ repos, right? That might skew numbers a bit.
- Shank 12y ago
  Well of course, but it's not like the dataset has any private repos for any languages -- so the data is only OSS.
- Shank 12y ago
  Well of course, but it's not like the dataset has any private repos for any languages -- so the data is only OSS.
andrewstuart2 12y ago
Beautiful use of D3. Looks like something Bostock himself would've made for the New York Times.
- couchand 12y ago
  Agreed. I like the sort of informal feel to it, calling back to a sketch. I'm a big fan of the parallel lines chart, and this one is well executed. The data labels are unobtrusive, appearing on hover to let you dive in. The data set is coordinated with navigation on the timeline above using the principle of object constancy [0]. I really like that you can click a language to pin it; you can focus on a few languages and watch their evolution over time by scrubbing the line chart. (I don't like that if a pinned language falls off the chart at one point in time it isn't restored when you go back to a time that it's on the chart.) I like the idea with the small multiples below, but I wish there was less wasted space; it's hard to see very many at one time. There's not really a need for full-blown small multiples here - vertically-aligned sparklines would be more effective. If they were in the same table as the parallel lines it would allow a deeper exploration of the data. [0]: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/
davedx 12y ago
Open issues per repository is an interesting one. I'd love to see open issues / LoC / repo for each language.
- msl09 12y ago
  I don't think that open issues/LoC is very relevant since some languages despite doing a lot in few lines of code(or even characters) still require an amount of mental effort similar to more verbose languages. I very much like how GitHut used issues/commits. In my interpretation: (1) If your project has a lot of commits and few issues it has a very high quality. (2) If your project has a few of commits and many issues it has either very low quality or is not being developed. (3) Having a lot of commits and a lot of issues and vice versa is kinda expected, since new features(commits) often introduce new bugs and small projects often have few of both. When you cross that with popularity(new forks, new watchers) over the years you can narrow (2) with some confidence. Using that approach is trickier when it comes to comparing languages, but the data GitHut gives seems to be in line with common knowledge, at least when it comes down to open source software and and when you compare the most popular languages.
  - msl09 12y ago
    The point I am(should be) trying to make is that, the graphs tell us a lot more about how the projects on each language are developing than it does about the individual merits of the language it self.
  - ufmace 12y ago
    Not so sure about that. Lots of commits and few issues could mean that it's cool or interesting somehow, but isn't actually being used for much. Vice versa for few commits and many issues. Hard to say much for sure without breaking down the details, who's discovering the issues, how many are real, how many are serious/blockers versus minor annoyances with workarounds or feature requests, are the commits new features, bug fixes, refactoring, etc.
Fiahil 12y ago
Rust is showing some interesting traits. Despite its slow start, it's catching up quickly enough.
- jonalmeida 12y ago
  Intentional pun? I've been trying to learn Rust myself by spending ~30 mins everyday on on it for the past 2 months. It's strange how simple it is to make something, but it's hard if you have no experience in functional programming.
  - Fiahil 12y ago
    I can relate to your pain. I came back to hardcore Scala, 2 years after a very quick introduction to functional programming. But, in the end, every seconds of head banging was absolutely worth it. Once you step into The Immutable Functional World, it will change the way you design software and there is no coming back :)
bhouston 12y ago
Languages with near flat or decreases in 2014: - Ruby (that was a bit surprising) - Dart (I guess the lack of native browser support is the killer here) - Typescript (I'm surprised this didn't take off) - Puppet (Interesting.) - ActionScript (obvious now that Flash is dead) - Scheme - Common Lisp - D - Fortran - Logos (huh?) (I know near flat is subjective, but still these are the languages that are not seeing much growth in 2014, and what likely isn't growing strong in 2014, is likely to continue that trend in 2015.)
- brational 12y ago
  >and what likely isn't growing strong in 2014, is likely to continue that trend in 2015. Based on what?
  - bhouston 12y ago
    Languages have momentum (growth, static, decay), and to change the momentum, something big has to happen, and usually big things do not happen. Past performance can generally be used as a predictor of future performance.
- Touche 12y ago
  > is likely to continue that trend in 2015. Going to state the obvious and say JavaScript. For all of the obvious reasons but also because ES6 is going to make it more palpable for those who formerly found it distasteful.
  - Killswitch 12y ago
    Oh man I can't wait for ES6 to be stable and widely adapted.
  - vivin 12y ago
    Did you mean palatable? :)
- unknownian 12y ago
  So pretty much almost every well-designed language that I like or was curious about is losing popularity in favor of Java and JS. Sigh. I remember when Ruby was #2 on GitHub. Those were the days.
nXqd 12y ago
Really nice statistics. I would love to know the name of that kind of statistics graph ? Thanks !
- dr_zoidberg 12y ago
  I'm not sure that kind of graph has a name, it looks like diagrams in circuits/code. My guess is that its a custom kind of graph inspired in the tools they knew for visualizing complex relationships. But I'd like to learn more about those kinds of graph if I'm wrong :)
- kaneplusplus 12y ago
  It's a hammock plot.
- couchand 12y ago
  I've heard it called a parallel coordinates or parallel lines chart.
  - kaneplusplus 12y ago
    According to the link below a hammock plot is generalization of a parallel coordinate plot where the lines are replaced by rectangles that are proportional to the number of observations they represent. This plot is different from both the traditional parallel coordinate plot and the hammock plot since the category's width is proportional to it's activity, not the line width. Maybe it's type is still unnamed. http://www.schonlau.net/publication/03jsm_hammockplot.pdf http://www.schonlau.net/publication/03jsm_hammockplot.pdf
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  Slopegraph http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003nk http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
megalodon 12y ago
Just a heads up; the page header (and footer?) does not render correctly on mobile. The top graph is centered and its data is impossible to read because of label overlapping. Interesting analysis nevertheless.
RA_Fisher 12y ago
R's bump in Q1Y14 is probably when CRAN, R's largest "official" repo archive pushed all of its packages to Github. Pretty neat to see the volume right there.
- bhouston 12y ago
  Sort of disconcerting that R is somewhat flat in terms of its growth though.
  - weavie 12y ago
    I would imagine that this is because R is a language that is more used for a specific purpose rather than a language that is developed.
  - hadley 12y ago
    I think there's steady growth in active R repos that's masked by the huge impact of Hopkin's Coursera course on reproducible research. Tens of thousands of people fork a repo for a homework (https://github.com/search?q=forks%3A%3E30000&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=forks%3A%3E30000&type=Repositori...), and then never touch it again
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    Part of that is the fact that many R packages are actually predominantly written in C++, C, Java, etc..., so they show up in Github searches as being written in a language other than R...
- hadley 12y ago
  FWIW that's not an official move by CRAN, it's just an interested individual mirroring all CRAN packages
CmonDev 12y ago
If only there was a way of analyzing the quality of the repository. Are those 1000s of snippet-size JS libraries and Ruby gems meaningful? It's interesting that strong static languages have more issues open (top 5) - easier to spot them?
- davedx 12y ago
  I think module size is a big factor. I would predict that C++, Java and C# tend to be larger, more monolithic projects, whereas JavaScript and Ruby have more broken up module ecosystems. JavaScript especially, with its "modularity shaming"...
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    Very well-factored C#/F# projects such as EF7 and F# compiler may look "monolithic" due to type safety and packaging.
carsonreinke 12y ago
It would be really neat to see how many repos have been abandoned per language (e.g. no activity in X)
zzzcpan 12y ago
This confirmed some of my suspicions. Ruby seems to be in decline, just like Perl, but not declared dead yet, maybe in a few years. Python looks like it's getting to that point as well, hard to tell though, will be clear in a year. Go is growing fast and already ahead of Perl.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
vinceyuan 12y ago
Thought GitHub published it officially. Just found it's GitHu(t) instead of GitHu(b). LOL Anyway, good job!
galfarragem 12y ago
Erlang and Clojure don't seem to take off on github, despite being very visible in HN.. It seems that everybody speaks about these languages but then they don't use them.
- slowmovintarget 12y ago
  Or they use them for getting work done and not for open source projects on GitHub. Clojure seems to be one of those languages where you can be just as productive creating the software yourself from whole-cloth as trying to grok someone else's DSL. If that's true then large bodies of application specific code would exist off the GitHut radar, I suspect. Not sure about Erlang.
bmoresbest55 12y ago
Java developer learning Django and playing with Node, React and Angular. 3/3.
- tom-lord 12y ago
  I wonder what the graph would look like if "Javascript" was broken down by framework, though...
vinceyuan 12y ago
Surprised to see the oldest programming language is Makefile (1970) in this chart. It appeared earlier than C (1972). Is this correct?
- calibwam 12y ago
  According to wikipedia [1], make appeared in 1976, so it should be younger than C. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)
- kjs3 12y ago
  C dates from 1969[1], though 1972 is probably a better date for "something very close to what first edition K&R describes". [1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html
Eleutheria 12y ago
When too much interactiveness is too much.
pla3rhat3r 12y ago
Beautifully designed page!
hharnisch 12y ago
It would be incredibly enlightening to see what languages people are moving to/from. (like this for but for programming languages - https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/coordinated-migration/10151930946453859 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/coordin...). I'd like to know what people are switching to from Ruby.
- reledi 12y ago
  My guess is the Rubyists aren't switching, but picking up additional languages such as JS or Go or Rust.
- quadratini 12y ago
  Javascript. ES6.
biomimic 12y ago
What about Tcl?
- jrapdx3 12y ago
  Tcl is still actively developed and has a sizable community interested in it. (see http://wiki.tcl.tk http://wiki.tcl.tk) It doesn't show up much on Github since its main repositories are hosted on on Sourceforge and Fossil. That includes the core language and most of the major extensions. Check the wiki for details.
themoonbus 12y ago
Languages from the early to mid 90's are doing quite well. 95 alone saw Java, JavaScript, Ruby and PHP.
arcticfox 12y ago
Am I the only one that doesn't like the visualization? It seems like it would be fundamentally better if each bar was simply labeled instead of connected via line. Mouseover could highlight the same language in the other categories to get the cross-category information. The question "What is ranked above Ruby for New Watchers Per Repository?" seems to be a question this dataset should be answering, but it is enormously difficult to parse here.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  Slopegraphs are more useful when you can sort by any of the columns. I guess the author thought the most important metric is active repositories.
  - achr2 12y ago
    Thanks for giving me a term to google. Also your point about sorting is vital, and would make this type of chart very useful for understanding relationships.
- craigjb 12y ago
  I agree. I don't think interaction should be necessary in a good visualization for most questions. It should add usability on top of an already usable graphic. This graphic would not be usable if published in a paper.
sagivo 12y ago
a look here (https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars) shows that from the top 10 all-time-stars 6 are javascript related.
ignoramous 12y ago
OCaml desperately needs some wind on its sail. It fares poorly than PowerShell in terms of # of repos, and that says it all really. Compared to Haskell and Clojure, which are soaring to put it mildly.
- amirmc 12y ago
  I think OCaml is doing pretty well for itself. For example see the graph of package-growth at [1] and the recent news from people at Facebook about Hack and Flow (both in OCaml). Not all repos are on GitHub and it's not really fair to expect them to be — especially for the sake of vanity metrics, such as this visualisation. In addition, some of the repos that have OCaml code may not be recorded as such. Repos where the 'brains' is in an expressive language might be overshadowed by boilerplate from elsewhere. [1] http://amirchaudhry.com/towards-governance-framework-for-ocamlorg/ http://amirchaudhry.com/towards-governance-framework-for-oca...
  - ignoramous 12y ago
    Thanks, I was starting to get a bit depressing seeing the stats on the website. In fact, I was shocked to find OCaml so far off from Clojure. I think the adoption problem for OCaml is compounded because it suffers from lack of stackoverflow hits for any given errors that you might encounter or any given queries you might have. Searching for something as mundane as "how to read large files in OCaml" leads to just a single hit (Streams at OCaml.org) [0]. Also, OCaml needs a "recipe/patterns" book-- on how-to get some of the things done the right way in OCaml. [0] BTW, a big fan of your work.
- mVChr 12y ago
  > Compared to Haskell and Clojure, which are soaring to put it mildly. Soaring comparatively. I am a big fan of OCaml, but I think one thing this infographic is heavily biased by is ease of adoption for programmers of all levels. Javascript, Python and others in the top all have that. OCaml and the like are all a bit steep on that front. However if you find OCaml in the tiny graph on the bottom you'll see that it's steadily increasing at least. Up about 50% in active repos from 2013 to 2014.
robbyking 12y ago
It's interesting to me that so many Objective C repositories have so few pushes yet so many forks. I wonder if it's because companies like Facebook and Square "release" open source projects on Github then move on to something else.
snhkicker 12y ago
I think that these statistics are a bit under-rated and a bit misleading -under-rated: CSS: has 80% more pushes than C++ WOW :O Javascript: remains to be super for small projects but man this sure brings a tear to your eye when you see 10.69 pushes per repo i think i may have misunderstood JS alot Safe Languages: are probably not as safe as we think -misleading: the fact that this isn't talking in anyway about the industry itself but about the LOVE given to each programming language for the following reasons: a)Developers in general contribute to opensource programming projects with the same concept gcc devs used when saying "compiling GCC as C++, we are writing code if you want it as C do so your self" as i understood it b)Interest and Time and Location on Github diverge from reality: Interest: Developers are interested in doing new things when it comes to Open Source so this may affect numbers alot Time:time changes everything Location: i think Github is number 1 place when it comes to Front-end programmers although every one likes it but in Javascript i think Github is the super man
- synunlimited 12y ago
  CSS could be explained with the idea that a lot of the pushes could be small little fixes and tweaks.
jvilk 12y ago
While I dig the idea, it's important to note a few issues with the dataset. Take the presented data with a huge grain of salt. First, many repositories are not a single language. For example, this PHP framework is reported as a CSS project [0]. While it has more lines of CSS than PHP, it only has a single CSS file [1]. Second, GitHub has a problem with correctly identifying programming languages. For example, PrimeCoin [1] is identified as one of the most popular TypeScript repositories, but it has 0 lines of TypeScript code. Instead, it has... large localization files with the extension *.ts [2]. BitCoin used to have the same problem, but it looks like GitHub hack fixed it for that particular repository as less popular forks of BitCoin still have this issue. It took me a few minutes to find these examples, just by examining trending repositories [4]. I'm sure there are many more. So do not be rash in drawing conclusions from this data! :) [0] https://github.com/laravel/laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel [1] https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/public/css/app.css https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/public/css/ap... [2] https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin [3] https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/tree/master/src/qt/locale https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/tree/master/src/qt/lo... [4] https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending
- abdias 12y ago
  I have discovered this as well. Although 100% of my own GitHub projects[1] are JavaScript, more than half appear as CSS due to the included documentation. Ideally, the project manager should be able to define the language composition in their own projects. Something GitHub should consider IMO. [1]: https://github.com/epistemex?tab=repositories https://github.com/epistemex?tab=repositories
  - moe 12y ago
    Yes, it's pretty annoying that the language detection can't be overridden. About half of the repos that I'm dealing with are mis-detected (usually as CSS or HTML due to included documentation).
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    I doubt many project managers would bother doing that -- what do they get out of it?
ayr-ton 12y ago
It is just beautiful.
ryanmarsh 12y ago
This is really good example of a useful slopegraph. I find so few of these in the wild thus I often fail to articulate the value of the approach such that a client will buy into the idea before I build it. for reference: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003nk http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... edit: the use of "small multiples" is superb as well
VOYD 12y ago
I like it.
duderific 12y ago
Sad to see, my dear old friend ColdFusion did not even make the list.
tdicola 12y ago
Is the data behind this visualization available anywhere or do people need to run the BigQuery queries themselves?
pama 12y ago
Swift wins the popularity contest: most watches per repository, third most forks per repository (R has most forks per repository). Anyone up for an iOS/Mac App with a statistics backend?
okcwarrior 12y ago
My C# MVC Web App is reported as a Javascript app because of the templates I use :0
visarga 12y ago
The top five languages were all created initially between 1991 and 1996. Is that by coincidence? Probably languages have a lifecycle and age matters a lot. The current top crop are about 20y.o. - just becoming adults. Would that mean that Swift and Rust will get in top 5 after year 2030?
montogeek 12y ago
This was already submitted months ago :s

406 points by jrslv 12y ago

gamesbrainiac 12y ago

Any new change that is of particular interest? I believe this page has been on HN before.

Retr0spectrum 12y ago
I only had a brief look, but I find the recent decline of Ruby quite interesting.
- kcorbitt 12y ago
  like V-2's top-level comment explains, there are lots of ways to interpret these statistics and it's easy to jump to false conclusions if you don't take the time to look for context. In Ruby's case, the total number of repositories on Github has continually increased -- it's just that since it was such a huge part of Github's early user base (the Rails community was probably the first big adopter of Github, which makes sense since Github itself is written in Rails) percentage-wise it has dropped significantly as more communities adopt Github.
  - Touche 12y ago
    I think he's referring to the number of repositories (which is not a percentage of total) is pretty much flat in the last year.

V-2 12y ago

It's what I call an "AHA" piece of statistics. Lots of data right there, and nicely visualised at that, only what it actually means is unfathomable without knowing any broader context. For instance: C++ has the greatest number of opened issues per repository, then comes Rust, then Scala. All right. Does it indicate that they're more tricky than others and hence more bug reports? Or perhaps that projects written in these languages are under more intense scrutiny? Or that people watching these repositories are just more eager to step up and file an issue instead of sulking in silence (a trait of programming culture surrounding these languages)? And so on, and so on. Or it could be one in case of C++, another in case of Rust - since they differ under so many aspects. Wide field for wildest speculations, but no meaningful correlations identified.

steveklabnik 12y ago
Rust is one of the heavier users of Issues. I've started a pretty huge re categorization and triage effort, and when I started, we had around 2200 open. Earlier today I got us to 1899. Part of this is that we tracked things like 'it would be nice to have a library to do things like X,' and in preparation for 1.0, we're moving those over to our RFC repo instead, so that the main project has only bugs and internal enhancements.
- V-2 12y ago
  Yes, I imagine, because it's a relatively new language. In case of other ones the reasons are probably of entirely different nature.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  ... I guess I should also mention that not all of them are these kinds of issues, there's also lots of stuff, like in any tracker, that got fixed somewhere, but the issue was never closed. Or where a library that used to exist no longer does. Etc. Triage is drudge work, but really valuable for any big project.
nly 12y ago
> C++ has the greatest number of opened issues per repository, then comes Rust, then Scala. All right. > Does it indicate that they're more tricky than others and hence more bug reports? They're all static languages. In fact, so are C# and Java (the next two of the top 5). Two of these (C++ and Rust) are also in the top 5 for pushes per repo. C++ being top overall. Imho, some of these stats needs to be scaled with respect to LOC. The push/issue ratio might be good as well.
burntsushi 12y ago
Yes, context is key! In addition to what steveklabnik said about Rust, the other interesting bit of context is that the deluge of breaking changes[1] has resulted in a very interesting phenomenon: everyone chips in and submits PRs to library dependencies that haven't been updated by their authors yet. The pace is so fast that most of the time, in my case, it's just a matter of "I haven't gotten home from work yet and there are already 3 PRs against my repos with fixes for the latest Rust nightly." As a result, many of my Rust projects have an oddly disproportionate number of contributors/pull requests relative to other projects I have that are more popular. [1] - Breaking changes have simmered down a lot in the last few weeks. We still have one more semi-big one in front of us, but hopefully smooth sailing from there...

krat0sprakhar 12y ago

Looks like 1995 was a great year for programming languages - PHP, Java, Javascript and Ruby were released!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- masklinn 12y ago
  You mean older. Python's initial release predates Java's by 4 years (although its v1.0 was only in 1994). More frustratingly, Haskell is older than both.
  - thu 12y ago
    I wonder how many man-month or how much money was put into GHC vs. cpython.
  - dukerutledge 12y ago
    Yeah, but you couldn't actually write anything useful in Haskell at that time.
- doctorstupid 12y ago
  Perhaps you meant older?
V-2 12y ago
You missed "but" after "PHP" ;) </trolling off>
- masklinn 12y ago
  The whole comment can be read as both straight or sarcastic, really.
Argorak 12y ago
Ruby's development started in 1993 (February 24, to be exact). First full release was 1995 (December 21, that one I had to look up :)). This is very interesting in my opinion: whenever someone asks why one of those languages doesn't do $featureA "like Java", you can just reply: "because Java wasn't a thing back then".

droob 12y ago

This is just _public_ repos, right? That might skew numbers a bit.

Shank 12y ago
Well of course, but it's not like the dataset has any private repos for any languages -- so the data is only OSS.
Shank 12y ago
Well of course, but it's not like the dataset has any private repos for any languages -- so the data is only OSS.

andrewstuart2 12y ago

Beautiful use of D3. Looks like something Bostock himself would've made for the New York Times.

couchand 12y ago
Agreed. I like the sort of informal feel to it, calling back to a sketch. I'm a big fan of the parallel lines chart, and this one is well executed. The data labels are unobtrusive, appearing on hover to let you dive in. The data set is coordinated with navigation on the timeline above using the principle of object constancy [0]. I really like that you can click a language to pin it; you can focus on a few languages and watch their evolution over time by scrubbing the line chart. (I don't like that if a pinned language falls off the chart at one point in time it isn't restored when you go back to a time that it's on the chart.) I like the idea with the small multiples below, but I wish there was less wasted space; it's hard to see very many at one time. There's not really a need for full-blown small multiples here - vertically-aligned sparklines would be more effective. If they were in the same table as the parallel lines it would allow a deeper exploration of the data. [0]: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/

davedx 12y ago

Open issues per repository is an interesting one. I'd love to see open issues / LoC / repo for each language.

msl09 12y ago
I don't think that open issues/LoC is very relevant since some languages despite doing a lot in few lines of code(or even characters) still require an amount of mental effort similar to more verbose languages. I very much like how GitHut used issues/commits. In my interpretation: (1) If your project has a lot of commits and few issues it has a very high quality. (2) If your project has a few of commits and many issues it has either very low quality or is not being developed. (3) Having a lot of commits and a lot of issues and vice versa is kinda expected, since new features(commits) often introduce new bugs and small projects often have few of both. When you cross that with popularity(new forks, new watchers) over the years you can narrow (2) with some confidence. Using that approach is trickier when it comes to comparing languages, but the data GitHut gives seems to be in line with common knowledge, at least when it comes down to open source software and and when you compare the most popular languages.
- msl09 12y ago
  The point I am(should be) trying to make is that, the graphs tell us a lot more about how the projects on each language are developing than it does about the individual merits of the language it self.
- ufmace 12y ago
  Not so sure about that. Lots of commits and few issues could mean that it's cool or interesting somehow, but isn't actually being used for much. Vice versa for few commits and many issues. Hard to say much for sure without breaking down the details, who's discovering the issues, how many are real, how many are serious/blockers versus minor annoyances with workarounds or feature requests, are the commits new features, bug fixes, refactoring, etc.

Fiahil 12y ago

Rust is showing some interesting traits. Despite its slow start, it's catching up quickly enough.

jonalmeida 12y ago
Intentional pun? I've been trying to learn Rust myself by spending ~30 mins everyday on on it for the past 2 months. It's strange how simple it is to make something, but it's hard if you have no experience in functional programming.
- Fiahil 12y ago
  I can relate to your pain. I came back to hardcore Scala, 2 years after a very quick introduction to functional programming. But, in the end, every seconds of head banging was absolutely worth it. Once you step into The Immutable Functional World, it will change the way you design software and there is no coming back :)

bhouston 12y ago

Languages with near flat or decreases in 2014: - Ruby (that was a bit surprising) - Dart (I guess the lack of native browser support is the killer here) - Typescript (I'm surprised this didn't take off) - Puppet (Interesting.) - ActionScript (obvious now that Flash is dead) - Scheme - Common Lisp - D - Fortran - Logos (huh?) (I know near flat is subjective, but still these are the languages that are not seeing much growth in 2014, and what likely isn't growing strong in 2014, is likely to continue that trend in 2015.)

brational 12y ago
>and what likely isn't growing strong in 2014, is likely to continue that trend in 2015. Based on what?
- bhouston 12y ago
  Languages have momentum (growth, static, decay), and to change the momentum, something big has to happen, and usually big things do not happen. Past performance can generally be used as a predictor of future performance.
Touche 12y ago
> is likely to continue that trend in 2015. Going to state the obvious and say JavaScript. For all of the obvious reasons but also because ES6 is going to make it more palpable for those who formerly found it distasteful.
- Killswitch 12y ago
  Oh man I can't wait for ES6 to be stable and widely adapted.
- vivin 12y ago
  Did you mean palatable? :)
unknownian 12y ago
So pretty much almost every well-designed language that I like or was curious about is losing popularity in favor of Java and JS. Sigh. I remember when Ruby was #2 on GitHub. Those were the days.

nXqd 12y ago

Really nice statistics. I would love to know the name of that kind of statistics graph ? Thanks !

dr_zoidberg 12y ago
I'm not sure that kind of graph has a name, it looks like diagrams in circuits/code. My guess is that its a custom kind of graph inspired in the tools they knew for visualizing complex relationships. But I'd like to learn more about those kinds of graph if I'm wrong :)
kaneplusplus 12y ago
It's a hammock plot.
couchand 12y ago
I've heard it called a parallel coordinates or parallel lines chart.
- kaneplusplus 12y ago
  According to the link below a hammock plot is generalization of a parallel coordinate plot where the lines are replaced by rectangles that are proportional to the number of observations they represent. This plot is different from both the traditional parallel coordinate plot and the hammock plot since the category's width is proportional to it's activity, not the line width. Maybe it's type is still unnamed. http://www.schonlau.net/publication/03jsm_hammockplot.pdf http://www.schonlau.net/publication/03jsm_hammockplot.pdf
ryanmarsh 12y ago
Slopegraph http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003nk http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

megalodon 12y ago

Just a heads up; the page header (and footer?) does not render correctly on mobile. The top graph is centered and its data is impossible to read because of label overlapping. Interesting analysis nevertheless.

RA_Fisher 12y ago

R's bump in Q1Y14 is probably when CRAN, R's largest "official" repo archive pushed all of its packages to Github. Pretty neat to see the volume right there.

bhouston 12y ago
Sort of disconcerting that R is somewhat flat in terms of its growth though.
- weavie 12y ago
  I would imagine that this is because R is a language that is more used for a specific purpose rather than a language that is developed.
- hadley 12y ago
  I think there's steady growth in active R repos that's masked by the huge impact of Hopkin's Coursera course on reproducible research. Tens of thousands of people fork a repo for a homework (https://github.com/search?q=forks%3A%3E30000&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=forks%3A%3E30000&type=Repositori...), and then never touch it again
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  Part of that is the fact that many R packages are actually predominantly written in C++, C, Java, etc..., so they show up in Github searches as being written in a language other than R...
hadley 12y ago
FWIW that's not an official move by CRAN, it's just an interested individual mirroring all CRAN packages

CmonDev 12y ago

If only there was a way of analyzing the quality of the repository. Are those 1000s of snippet-size JS libraries and Ruby gems meaningful? It's interesting that strong static languages have more issues open (top 5) - easier to spot them?

davedx 12y ago
I think module size is a big factor. I would predict that C++, Java and C# tend to be larger, more monolithic projects, whereas JavaScript and Ruby have more broken up module ecosystems. JavaScript especially, with its "modularity shaming"...
- CmonDev 12y ago
  Very well-factored C#/F# projects such as EF7 and F# compiler may look "monolithic" due to type safety and packaging.

carsonreinke 12y ago

It would be really neat to see how many repos have been abandoned per language (e.g. no activity in X)

zzzcpan 12y ago

This confirmed some of my suspicions. Ruby seems to be in decline, just like Perl, but not declared dead yet, maybe in a few years. Python looks like it's getting to that point as well, hard to tell though, will be clear in a year. Go is growing fast and already ahead of Perl.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

vinceyuan 12y ago

Thought GitHub published it officially. Just found it's GitHu(t) instead of GitHu(b). LOL Anyway, good job!

galfarragem 12y ago

Erlang and Clojure don't seem to take off on github, despite being very visible in HN.. It seems that everybody speaks about these languages but then they don't use them.

slowmovintarget 12y ago
Or they use them for getting work done and not for open source projects on GitHub. Clojure seems to be one of those languages where you can be just as productive creating the software yourself from whole-cloth as trying to grok someone else's DSL. If that's true then large bodies of application specific code would exist off the GitHut radar, I suspect. Not sure about Erlang.

bmoresbest55 12y ago

Java developer learning Django and playing with Node, React and Angular. 3/3.

tom-lord 12y ago
I wonder what the graph would look like if "Javascript" was broken down by framework, though...

vinceyuan 12y ago

Surprised to see the oldest programming language is Makefile (1970) in this chart. It appeared earlier than C (1972). Is this correct?

calibwam 12y ago
According to wikipedia [1], make appeared in 1976, so it should be younger than C. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)
kjs3 12y ago
C dates from 1969[1], though 1972 is probably a better date for "something very close to what first edition K&R describes". [1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html

Eleutheria 12y ago

When too much interactiveness is too much.

pla3rhat3r 12y ago

Beautifully designed page!

hharnisch 12y ago

It would be incredibly enlightening to see what languages people are moving to/from. (like this for but for programming languages - https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/coordinated-migration/10151930946453859 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/coordin...). I'd like to know what people are switching to from Ruby.

reledi 12y ago
My guess is the Rubyists aren't switching, but picking up additional languages such as JS or Go or Rust.
quadratini 12y ago
Javascript. ES6.

biomimic 12y ago

What about Tcl?

jrapdx3 12y ago
Tcl is still actively developed and has a sizable community interested in it. (see http://wiki.tcl.tk http://wiki.tcl.tk) It doesn't show up much on Github since its main repositories are hosted on on Sourceforge and Fossil. That includes the core language and most of the major extensions. Check the wiki for details.

themoonbus 12y ago

Languages from the early to mid 90's are doing quite well. 95 alone saw Java, JavaScript, Ruby and PHP.

arcticfox 12y ago

Am I the only one that doesn't like the visualization? It seems like it would be fundamentally better if each bar was simply labeled instead of connected via line. Mouseover could highlight the same language in the other categories to get the cross-category information. The question "What is ranked above Ruby for New Watchers Per Repository?" seems to be a question this dataset should be answering, but it is enormously difficult to parse here.

ryanmarsh 12y ago
Slopegraphs are more useful when you can sort by any of the columns. I guess the author thought the most important metric is active repositories.
- achr2 12y ago
  Thanks for giving me a term to google. Also your point about sorting is vital, and would make this type of chart very useful for understanding relationships.
craigjb 12y ago
I agree. I don't think interaction should be necessary in a good visualization for most questions. It should add usability on top of an already usable graphic. This graphic would not be usable if published in a paper.

sagivo 12y ago

a look here (https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars https://github.com/stars?direction=desc&sort=stars) shows that from the top 10 all-time-stars 6 are javascript related.

ignoramous 12y ago

OCaml desperately needs some wind on its sail. It fares poorly than PowerShell in terms of # of repos, and that says it all really. Compared to Haskell and Clojure, which are soaring to put it mildly.

amirmc 12y ago
I think OCaml is doing pretty well for itself. For example see the graph of package-growth at [1] and the recent news from people at Facebook about Hack and Flow (both in OCaml). Not all repos are on GitHub and it's not really fair to expect them to be — especially for the sake of vanity metrics, such as this visualisation. In addition, some of the repos that have OCaml code may not be recorded as such. Repos where the 'brains' is in an expressive language might be overshadowed by boilerplate from elsewhere. [1] http://amirchaudhry.com/towards-governance-framework-for-ocamlorg/ http://amirchaudhry.com/towards-governance-framework-for-oca...
- ignoramous 12y ago
  Thanks, I was starting to get a bit depressing seeing the stats on the website. In fact, I was shocked to find OCaml so far off from Clojure. I think the adoption problem for OCaml is compounded because it suffers from lack of stackoverflow hits for any given errors that you might encounter or any given queries you might have. Searching for something as mundane as "how to read large files in OCaml" leads to just a single hit (Streams at OCaml.org) [0]. Also, OCaml needs a "recipe/patterns" book-- on how-to get some of the things done the right way in OCaml. [0] BTW, a big fan of your work.
mVChr 12y ago
> Compared to Haskell and Clojure, which are soaring to put it mildly. Soaring comparatively. I am a big fan of OCaml, but I think one thing this infographic is heavily biased by is ease of adoption for programmers of all levels. Javascript, Python and others in the top all have that. OCaml and the like are all a bit steep on that front. However if you find OCaml in the tiny graph on the bottom you'll see that it's steadily increasing at least. Up about 50% in active repos from 2013 to 2014.

robbyking 12y ago

It's interesting to me that so many Objective C repositories have so few pushes yet so many forks. I wonder if it's because companies like Facebook and Square "release" open source projects on Github then move on to something else.

snhkicker 12y ago

I think that these statistics are a bit under-rated and a bit misleading -under-rated: CSS: has 80% more pushes than C++ WOW :O Javascript: remains to be super for small projects but man this sure brings a tear to your eye when you see 10.69 pushes per repo i think i may have misunderstood JS alot Safe Languages: are probably not as safe as we think -misleading: the fact that this isn't talking in anyway about the industry itself but about the LOVE given to each programming language for the following reasons: a)Developers in general contribute to opensource programming projects with the same concept gcc devs used when saying "compiling GCC as C++, we are writing code if you want it as C do so your self" as i understood it b)Interest and Time and Location on Github diverge from reality: Interest: Developers are interested in doing new things when it comes to Open Source so this may affect numbers alot Time:time changes everything Location: i think Github is number 1 place when it comes to Front-end programmers although every one likes it but in Javascript i think Github is the super man

synunlimited 12y ago
CSS could be explained with the idea that a lot of the pushes could be small little fixes and tweaks.

jvilk 12y ago

While I dig the idea, it's important to note a few issues with the dataset. Take the presented data with a huge grain of salt. First, many repositories are not a single language. For example, this PHP framework is reported as a CSS project [0]. While it has more lines of CSS than PHP, it only has a single CSS file [1]. Second, GitHub has a problem with correctly identifying programming languages. For example, PrimeCoin [1] is identified as one of the most popular TypeScript repositories, but it has 0 lines of TypeScript code. Instead, it has... large localization files with the extension *.ts [2]. BitCoin used to have the same problem, but it looks like GitHub hack fixed it for that particular repository as less popular forks of BitCoin still have this issue. It took me a few minutes to find these examples, just by examining trending repositories [4]. I'm sure there are many more. So do not be rash in drawing conclusions from this data! :) [0] https://github.com/laravel/laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel [1] https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/public/css/app.css https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/public/css/ap... [2] https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin [3] https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/tree/master/src/qt/locale https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/tree/master/src/qt/lo... [4] https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending

abdias 12y ago
I have discovered this as well. Although 100% of my own GitHub projects[1] are JavaScript, more than half appear as CSS due to the included documentation. Ideally, the project manager should be able to define the language composition in their own projects. Something GitHub should consider IMO. [1]: https://github.com/epistemex?tab=repositories https://github.com/epistemex?tab=repositories
- moe 12y ago
  Yes, it's pretty annoying that the language detection can't be overridden. About half of the repos that I'm dealing with are mis-detected (usually as CSS or HTML due to included documentation).
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  I doubt many project managers would bother doing that -- what do they get out of it?

ayr-ton 12y ago

It is just beautiful.

ryanmarsh 12y ago

This is really good example of a useful slopegraph. I find so few of these in the wild thus I often fail to articulate the value of the approach such that a client will buy into the idea before I build it. for reference: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003nk http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... edit: the use of "small multiples" is superb as well

VOYD 12y ago

I like it.

duderific 12y ago

Sad to see, my dear old friend ColdFusion did not even make the list.

tdicola 12y ago

Is the data behind this visualization available anywhere or do people need to run the BigQuery queries themselves?

pama 12y ago

Swift wins the popularity contest: most watches per repository, third most forks per repository (R has most forks per repository). Anyone up for an iOS/Mac App with a statistics backend?

okcwarrior 12y ago

My C# MVC Web App is reported as a Javascript app because of the templates I use :0

visarga 12y ago

The top five languages were all created initially between 1991 and 1996. Is that by coincidence? Probably languages have a lifecycle and age matters a lot. The current top crop are about 20y.o. - just becoming adults. Would that mean that Swift and Rust will get in top 5 after year 2030?

montogeek 12y ago

This was already submitted months ago :s