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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already established other repositories.

That's not to say that Lisp is popular, only to suggest that Github is not necessarily the best sampling of its development communities.

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I also suspect that Github might be a terrible sample of the overall programming community. I'd be curious to find out what the real numbers are if we also take in consideration the large corp, gov and science conglomerates who might be using anything form COBOL to Ada.

Yeah, I have to agree. My github account is pretty barren, mostly because the lion share of my work is done professionally on private repos simply sitting on a server behind a firewall. In fact, you'd be amazed at how much code in the wild simply sits in backed up files in someone's ~/src folder. Lots of engineers, especially older ones, never learned that kind of practice.

A big chunk of my code is C, C++, VHDL, Verilog, miscellaneous PLC/PAC dialects, etc... in other words, industrial stuff that doesn't get a lot of attention from the 'fun' startup sector. Github's numbers are most likely misrepresenting (not representing?) a HUGE section of 'hard' engineering. Add to that what you've mentioned, i.e. the copious amounts of legacy and domain specific stuff still lying around, and it means you've got a hugely biased sampling.

Large corporations, governments and science conglomerates that use COBOL and Ada are not part of any community.

Is NASA not a community? I don't know.

No, it's a company/organisation.

in general github rankings are not a good measure of anything. f.ex. javascript ranking as #1 is no wonder, when every other web project packages some jquery plugins (or jquery the lib), and even docs often have some js in them. the ruby bias was also noticable on github from the beginning (while f.ex. I believe bitbucket has a python bias), one can only doubt it dominates less cool languages in the wild.

>Because they predate Github by many years Lisps tend to have already established other repositories.

Citation needed. Because I see C and C++ in there, that also predate GitHub by many years.

And since we're not talking about 50 year old Lisp programmers (that would predate GitHub for 3 decades), so does Perl, Python, Java etc.

The Lisp projects that I use are hosted on common-lisp.net and SourceForge.

How is that different for any of the other top 10 languages?

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