Comments on R-Chart: GitHub Stats on Programming Languages

To summarize: 1) There are problems with a few o...

2010-08-17T13:18:53.706-07:00

To summarize:

1) There are problems with a few of the entries that resulted in certain languages (VB and Lisp variants) not being represented. As Phil pointed out, the search should have had each term surrounded in quotes to account for the space.

2) The data is derived from github - good, bad or indifferent. It does not necessarily represent the popularity or value of languages in other contexts, and may be skewed in a variety of ways (depending upon your perspective). It is what it is - that is why I describe the source process involved summarizing the data a bit. It is an attempt to be transparent about assumptions. I am glad others (citizen428 for example) use the data set as well.

Thanks all for your response - will incorporate what was learned into future posts.

github thinks my flex projects are javascript. may...

2010-08-11T18:55:22.464-07:00

github thinks my flex projects are javascript. maybe this gives javascript more glory than it should...?

Nice post :-) Thanks for posting your data set, I ...

2010-08-10T15:36:15.666-07:00

Nice post :-) Thanks for posting your data set, I played around with it using Incanter, a statistical computing and graphics library for Clojure:

http://citizen428.net/archives/435-GitHub-stats-with-Incanter.html

It'd be nice to have Fantom (http://fantom.org...

2010-08-10T09:51:04.511-07:00

It'd be nice to have Fantom (http://fantom.org) included. Not that I'd expect many repositories ;)

I hope nobody extrapolates anything more general f...

2010-08-10T08:18:17.140-07:00

I hope nobody extrapolates anything more general from this data than that these languages have these populations ON GITHUB.

It's not a surprise that Ruby and JS are on to...

2010-08-10T01:25:00.917-07:00

It's not a surprise that Ruby and JS are on top - they are both languages which has seen a success in the last years as github grew, while the other languages have thousands of projects which predate github and are hosted elsewhere (for example SourceForge).

There's a project called gitpan, which mirrors...

2010-08-09T22:53:26.314-07:00

There's a project called gitpan, which mirrors all the released history of Perl's CPAN modules on github repositories. And the project currently hosts 22,000 repositories, and that's why. http://github.com/gitpan

One thing to note is that it's likely, if you ...

2010-08-09T18:20:24.663-07:00

One thing to note is that it's likely, if you just used GitHub's data, is that quite a few of these projects were misclassified. I don't know how bad it'll be, if at all, but I've seen Ruby projects classified as JavaScript because of their ../public/js/ folder.

Just realized all the languages at the bottom have...

2010-08-09T18:13:42.532-07:00

Just realized all the languages at the bottom have spaces in them; that's probably the culprit.

There are definitely some issues with the way I sc...

2010-08-09T16:31:48.011-07:00

There are definitely some issues with the way I scraped the data - Emacs Lisp does come up on the list - http://github.com/languages/Emacs%20Lisp.

Will look into this and update it once the issue has been identified...

Emacs Lisp is the 11th-most popular language on Gi...

2010-08-09T16:22:57.847-07:00

Emacs Lisp is the 11th-most popular language on Github; I wonder why it's at the bottom of your chart?

The "striking" Perl drop-off is probably...

2010-08-09T14:48:29.563-07:00

The "striking" Perl drop-off is probably explained by this: http://github.com/gitpan