Ranking Programming Languages by Size of Community and Number of Projects | Hacker News Reader

Ranking Programming Languages by Size of Community and Number of Projects

readwriteweb.com

47 pointsghurlman16 comments

Original blog post here: http://www.dataists.com/2010/12/ranking-the-popularity-of-pr...

RWW pretty much just repackaged the original post with a small amount of commentary.

The title should really include "on Github". If you included GNU projects and BSD and so on, you'd get a lot more C, for example.

I think that even just adding sourceforge may have pumped C a lot more.

Not going to squint at that. But really, ranking languages by money involved:

  COBOL 1.0
  JAVA  0.1
  C++   0.1
 .NET   0.05
  OTHER 0.0000001

ADA must be at 0.75 at least then!

There are obvious holes in the methodology, so I wouldn't take the content of the post too seriously. What I do think is great about this post is how the authors generated a bunch of hits from an hour or so of work. Pick a topic with wide interest, do some simple (but non-trivial, if you aren't used to the tools) analysis, watch the traffic roll in! It's a good model for anyone trying to drive traffic to their site.

Being successful on the internet is easy! Just create interesting content, and then generate viewers!

Programming languages, databases, and browsers ranked based on a variety of characteristics:

http://hammerprinciple.com/

I wonder whether using unanswered questions from SO was a good idea.

Shouldn't it mean that the community is lacking cohesion?

I'd be interested in the trends! What communities are growing, which ones are shrinking, and which ones are stable?

I'm surprised to see so many assembly projects on github. Also, Delphi is missing from the tiers.

Just out of curiosity, as I've not started with Github (yet).

How many environments for languages/operating systems have most of their stuff in pre-github systems (CPAN and Perlmonks for Perl, kernels, etc)?

Pretty much everything except that which is rails related.

In more seriousness, what do you mean by stuff?

Many gems have their source in github, but really if github imploded tomorrow gem install rails would still work.

Do you mean, who doesn't host their source on github / have a clone of it on github, or do you mean what pieces of infrastructure would fail if github went down tomorrow.

"or do you mean what pieces of infrastructure would fail if github went down tomorrow."

The answer to that being: not many. The basic architecture of git (and other DVCS's) is, that everyone has a copy of the full revision history, so if github really went down, you'd see most of the projects there (at least most of the active ones someone cares about) on gitorious or some other git hosting service within a very short period of time, and things would go on with only a minor interruption.

You could also make the argument that older languages are discussed on sites other than StackOverflow (ie, Google Groups, direct forums, etc). I get the impression it all washes out in the end.

Perlmonks which I mentioned, is a StackOverflow variant since a decade, or so.

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