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Comment by gexla | Hacker News Reader

I don't know this is a good indication of trends. As the article (somewhat shallowly) shows, there are stories behind of these graphs.

Ruby has probably just settled to a normal position post early adopter. Shows that Ruby is still strong.

Javascript is probably building the sorts of libraries that other languages already have. These guys have had a lot of work to do.

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Yes, Ruby was very much "overrepresented" in the early days of github, so the decline in its growth relative to other languages is fairly normal sounding, rather than indicative of its actual decline.

Also, Javascript is something that is going to get checked in to lots of web projects one way or another. I wonder if they weed out duplicate copies of, say, jQuery.

I wonder if they weed out duplicate copies of, say, jQuery.

These stats have not in my experience been very reliable at all, and tend to massively overcount javascript. I've had a few projects tagged 'javascript' when in fact they were web projects and just had some common js libraries like jquery included (ruby and golang projects).

> I wonder if they weed out duplicate copies of, say, jQuery.

Linguist tries to filter out things like that:

https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...

"Tries" is the operative word here. There is a documented history of utter incompetence in Linguist.

Likewise for most of GitHub's other libraries. Sundown is some of the worst code I've ever seen.

Ah, it is only on internet forums where someone can argue that a sharply downward trending graph shows that a language is 'still strong'.

"GitHub is a specific community that’s grown very quickly since it launched [writeup]. It was not initially reflective of open source as a whole but rather centered around the Ruby on Rails community"

Github has moved out of a niche over the past five years, and the graph demonstrates that.

Not really. It is universal that statistics can easily misrepresent if one doesn't take a critical look at choice of data and how it is presented. For example in this case the focus on new repos/issues/etc. is suspicious to me. It could very well be that we just see a rise in one-off Javascript uploads to Github here, instead of a comparison of sustained development on mature projects.

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