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Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

I cannot fathom why such a visually jarring thick bar of color representing the languages used is the most prominent visual element on the page.

It makes no sense. Especially when you consider that you already likely know the primary language the project you're looking at is written in.

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What's funny is that I came back to this post specifically to ask where the language bar had gone... the last couple repos I looked at were "pure" so I didn't see the usual blocky bar– just a solid stripe that I didn't think twice about. If only we could swap perception, because I really want to see the language breakdown in repos. It's quite nice when you come across a project you've never heard of before and can see immediately whether it's 100% this or that, 50% shell, or whatever. Even projects you have heard of, it's nice to get the overview, especially if you're interested in contributing by, for example, rewriting certain parts in a higher or lower level language.

According to the blog post that introduced the new design, the reason behind creating a visual representation of the repository was for identification. For a developer, often they will be working on a few different repos at once, not just one. The idea is that each repo will have a basic "signature" in the color across the top. After enough time spent on the project page, the developer will just be able to distinguish the project from one another just by the color bar.

What's worse is that the two most common languages on GitHub (Ruby and JavaScript) are represented by shades of red/orange. I almost thought one of my repositories was in some kind of error state when I first opened it in the new design.

Totally agree. The only use I see is when you're simply searching for projects/solutions and you want to quickly ascertain popularity and language. That said, I'm not sure I'll remember the color-language relationships without a lot of work that I'm not interested in performing.

I think there's a disconnect in the use case of you and the OP compared to some other people (like me). 90% of the time when I'm looking at a Github repo it's for a new project so things like language composition, number (or existence) of tags to download and clone URL are all very handy. Only 10% of the time am I looking at a project that I'm already intimately familiar with.

> things like language composition, number (or existence) of tags [...] are all very handy

Why? How? I just can't fathom what use they could be outside of pointless wankery.

It really doesn't deserve the real estate that it's taking up. Terrible decision imo.

totally agree, wtf.

but regarding the rest of the design, I think its a huge improvement.

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