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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

They're selling it short - it's the largest coding community full stop.

"As of 15 February, 2023, community statistics on the language's official website show more than 123 million projects shared by over 103 million users, over 804 million total projects"[1]

Compare to GitHub:

"As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories"[2]

Of course, the average Scratch user is very different from the average GitHub user, and the average Scratch project is very different from the average GitHub repo - but the numbers don't lie (probably).

[1] https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/

[2] https://github.blog/2023-01-25-100-million-developers-and-co...

Edit: Somewhat tangentially, bear in mind that Scratch publicly launched in 2007. The first generation of Scratch learners are now adults with jobs in-industry, who appear from time to time on the front page of HN ;)

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Every time you open a new instance of the Scratch editor, Scratch saves it as a new project. It's still a huge number but a bit skewed compared to e.g. Github.

103 million users is still more than 100 million developers though, even if you disregard the number of projects.

Haha pretty sure GitHub counts pointless forks and generator projects though

Scratch has their version of a fork, called a "remix".

Pretty sure Excel is the largest coding group in the world, they just don't share their code in Github.

"Community" being the key word.

All Microsoft needs to do here is to include a stripped down IM inside Excel, a blend between MS Teams and Chatroulette, but with a twist: it will upload what you're working on to Bing to take a look at, group you with others whose Excel sheets are closest to your in the latent space, and connect you all in a group chat.

Like magic, fluid, self-associative communities.

I can see why this got down-voted, but seeing this in fruition would be quite interesting.

Of course, this would probably require sharing internal corporate data which is a big no-no.

I wonder if you could have this where the chat just tokenizes or minifies code on the client and spits out human readable made up stuff on the other end.

sounds like the new Microsoft Loop product/service announced a few days ago

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/2...

I have never seen a programmer as excited to tell me about something like, say, Duff's Device as I've seen one excel user hear another ask "what're pivot tables"? and to have the other reply "Let me show you..." That may have to do with the kind of party I end up at, but "helping each other out" is a rather important feature of any community. There are also Excel championships with a prize. https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/microsoft-excel-wor...

When's the last time you got a prize for programming outside of your paycheck or a signing bonus? Communities definitely have shared events and what better shared event than a competition?

I'm amused that's still going, one of my classmates qualified for and attended the Word championship hosted in Vegas many years ago.

As for programming prizes, "last week" if we're counting bug-bounties, "a few years ago" if we're counting CTFs, and 5 years ago if we're not.

Clearly there is an Excel community in the general sense but as far as I know it isn't centered around any particular venue - at least, not one at the scale of GitHub or Scratch

Infosec is a community unto itself. What was the competition 5 years ago?

You have to wonder why there isn't a huge online excel community.

Shame?

they work in single cells...

They’re all in sleeper cells.

The numbers do lie I think. I have two Github accounts (work and private). My single Scratch account is also used by my two kids. So Scratch might be even more ahead.

On the other hand, your numbers are accounts, I assume. Not active users

Many Scratchers hop between accounts like they're… well, accounts in a computer system. Last I checked, the average (among active Scratchers) seemed to be about 4 accounts per person.

Many kids created several user profiles. Most of the times when they "level up" and for example "learn functions" (custom blocks), instead of create new projects with the learning old ones they create a new user profile so I would at least divide 103 million users by two.

Anecdotally, I have at least 3 GitHub profiles

I have many profiles on any platform that I use a lot (at least 15 on HN and 15 on reddit).

Genuine question: why? I only have one, and I wonder if I'm missing something.

Anecdata: my sister had a additional Facebook account for gaming on this social media platform and adding strangers as friends for related bonuses without running the risk of inviting stalkers.

EDIT: additional, not "duplicate", which would imply any of the personal data was similar - it was of course fictional.

I do it in an effort to preserve privacy...

Note that Scratch does not require users to verify their email addresses (although some functionality is restricted), so the barrier to entry is somewhat lower.

Even for confirmed email addresses, Scratch is super lax in terms of what they'll accept. My company (a childrens' coding enrichment program) probably has upwards of a thousand Scratch accounts attached to a single gmail via "+" aliases, and Scratch doesn't care at all.

Is scratch counting remixes in the total projects? I doubt Github is counting folks.

Also sharing raw user count doesn't mean much. I have a suspicious github deletes far more bot accounts than scratch does and really we should care about something like MAU which takes into account retention.

Why wouldn't github count forks? I have several repos forked with my own local changes. (I also have some repos forked without changes.) They should absolutely count forks with commits on them at the very least.

>Why wouldn't github count forks?

Internally all forks are stored in the original repository. So it would be reasonable to expect Github to just count the number of repositories that exists.

are you sure? how does that work? how does git clone know to only give me my fork and not the whole repository? to my understanding they must be full copies. they can use hardlinks to avoid duplicating files to save space.

By that metric, gist.github.com is probably the world's largest coding community.

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