Number of active repositories in GitHub per language, per month | Hacker News Reader

Number of active repositories in GitHub per language, per month

github.com

55 pointsekeller50 comments

So I took the 2016 numbers from this and used them to make this graph, using the same data but normalizing for github's growth - so its showing the % share of the overall instead of absolute #'s. It tells a different story:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zs1pO_8Q6RASJ6Mc10kB...

EDIT I don't think one is more correct than the other, its just another perspective. I didn't mean to imply the first one is incorrect.

That legend is 100% useless. I'm not even color blind but I might as well be given how many shades of teal are involved.

Please, please, put the labels on or near the lines if possible. I'm not asking for the full Edward Tufte treatment here, but something sane would be greatly appreciated.

I did a similar thing, but plotting the absolute number in a log scale instead of the fractions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12fMABCdFtPhZf28DDY2h...

EDIT: Here's the fractions, stacked which I think is easier to look at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12fMABCdFtPhZf28DDY2h...

Here's all three years.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JAAfQBdKJ_2Tz0tVn7D9...

Nice, this is better. It also adds the 4 additional languages that were added to the graphs after I made mine.

What happened to Perl that it spikes to 12% for one month about 2 years ago? then it went back down to its normal obscurity at 1%.

Probably this happened https://github.com/gitpan

Yeah, it's hard to see what's going on without any normalization. Most of the languages do not actually grow.

Programmers run on coffee [1]; languages that start with coffee [2] are really active :)

Couldn't resist; it's a Friday.

[1] https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/6a/68/e4/6a68e478a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Indonesia...

Would be nice to see other popular languages like Python, Ruby, Scala and PHP too.

Yeah, I was a bit shocked to see Python, PHP, and Ruby not on the list. At first I noticed PHP was missing and I thought... oh no, another PHP hater... then I noticed Ruby is too. I look forward to seeing the update.

True.. working in

Done, we have 14 languages now.

Thank you. Very cool to see.

You know what I like about this? Is that if you have an objective enough mind, you can see how awesome it is that all of these languages have so many open source projects. For people like myself (C# developer), it makes me realize I need to do more with OSS, and not just to be better than the next language.

Strange that Python wasn't included. It would come in half-way between Java/JavaScript and C#/C++

I currently add 5 new languages.. will be updated in half an hour

Done. Python, Ruby and others are available.

Would be interesting to see the number of lines in those JS and Java repos. I expect JS to be tons of 50 lines 'libraries' and Java to have tons of 50k lines 'libraries'.

As an iOS Developer, I'm surprised that there are more Objective-C repos than any other language, including Javascript, on GitHub. Does that seem surprising to anyone else?

Would love to figure out why that is the case...

I'm surprised too. I don't get it. iOS apps especially are not a fertile field for open source development because they can't be sideloaded. I don't understand how Objective C repos could be #1. I'd love to see a random sample of 100 projects identified as being of each language so I could compare them and see if they're all actually legitimate repos.

I don't think I've even once seen anyone linking to an Objective C repo. Other languages? All the time. Hell, this link goes to a Go repo. But Objective C? Never.

It's actually C. The colors are just very similar.

If you look at the tables below, it is indeed Objective-C.

For Oct of this year, C is listed as 31k active repos, JS is 186k, and Obj-C is 224k. The ratio of C to JS ratios seems reasonable, so I have no reason to believe that they're C repos misclassified either.

What could possibly be the reason for such a large uptick in java repos?

One explanation could be large open source organizations like Apache and eclipse mirroring their code more and more on github. And all the old codehaus stuff that's been moved. Just a guess...

Java's picking up steam again. 8 and 9 released recently, OpenJDK is every bit as good as Oracle JDK, it's as fast as C++ these days, I'd guess a lot of libraries and things being rewritten for a new generation - eliminating old cruft, and starting new projects in modern Java.

> it's as fast as C++ these days

And C++ is as safe as Java these days. [1]

I wonder which claim is more optimistic. :)

[1] shameless plug: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus

Do you know of a good resource to catch up on this "modern" Java for someone who dropped it in the early 00's?

http://clojure.org/ :)

There's a large uptick in everything.

It would be nice to see a log version of this graph (either with just the vertical axis logarithmic or both).

True. I was not comfortable with the linear version (especially with the 14 languages now). I will publish both.

C++/C# repositories have more or less doubled since Jan16 (from 10000ish to 20000ish) and so have Java ones (75000ish to 150000ish).

So, there is not really an uptick in terms of percentage, the rise is more apparent in Java (and Javascript) case since they were more popular in the first place.

To see the relative shift in popularity, you would have to normalize the data against the total repos, I think.

Also language popularity based on this data might not be a fair conclusion. Some languages and environments do not lend themselves to OSS. For example, how many iOS app developers (using Swift) open source their app? Another is how many C# devs are using github as their repository over the various MS technologies.

Of course, in the context of github.

Android maybe?

Also the success of Minecraft which was written in Java might be encouraging people to make their own game engines or open source their own Java mods, etc. Just an idea, not sure if it's true.

What happens around early March each year that makes it a wonderful time to start a coding project?

Soon-to-be graduates panicking about finding a new job would be my first guess.

I'd guess could be environmental. Springtime, more sunlight in the northern hemisphere, holidays are over for awhile, etc...

This blog post [0] is possibly related. It's dated March 12, 2015 and is about Google Code shutting down and how to migrate code to Github.

[0] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google...

Expected. Good results for C# after open source .NET

C# results are released

Do people use something different than github to host Ruby projects these days or is Ruby really declining so fast?

I think Java numbers look little strange. Java repos more than doubled from Jan to Nov this year.

Oracle shut down java.net and a lot of Oracle focused projects and other open source projects moved in. Extract from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5cfh08/go_rust...

Most universities teach many classes in Java, which would explain some of that time frame.

Also, Android code is Java, so that's padding the numbers as well.

All the languages more than doubled on that period.

Yeah looks like part of this is just github's growth. Would be interesting to see this normalized for that - like languages share of the overall 100%.

Interesting, I wonder whats with the uptick on perl repos in Oct '14

What about R?

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