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Because early adopters of the website were prominent Microsoft developers. Such as Jon Skeet. This caused network effects. To suggest just because a door is opened that every developer has an equal chance of walking through is absurd. This is not evidence that the general software community wants or needs c# more than any other thing. For many developers more traditional channels of q and a are still popular, such as mailing lists.

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Jon Skeet is a Google developer. Well early Git adopters were Linux developers. Does it mean that GitHub is not really mainstream apart from a narrow group of people?

> Does it mean that GitHub is not really mainstream apart from a narrow group of people?

Does git even work well on Windows yet?

Yes it does - command-line, GitHub for Windows, SourceTree, IDE plugin - you name it, it has it.

Assuming this isn't supposed to be rhetorical - yes, it works pretty well in fact. Windows's bizarrely ropey FS performance means it's a bit slower, but in general the experience is basically the same as using it under OS X. SourceTree/git gui/gitk are work the same.

It may be now (I'll take your word for it), but for the longest time, "windows support" was one of the only selling points anybody could provide for choosing mercurial over git (the other being some people prefer mercurial's branching/tagging to git's).

So, if git didn't work fine on windows for a long time, there would be plenty of time for network effects to entrench github as a non-windows site, and indeed that is the case. Github is where you'll find a lot of javascript, trendy open source projects, and even os x apps, but not so much windows stuff.

Open source on Windows (and thus github usage) in general seems to be something of a second class citizen. There's Cygwin of course which brings you a lot of the open source tools, but it's far more common for Windows apps to be closed source it seems. Linux of course due to its nature tends to favor open source apps quite heavily, but it would be interesting to compare how many apps are closed vs. open on OS X as compared to Windows.

I work daily on git-bash with no problem at all.

I works very well. In fact, Microsoft has full embraced it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh850437.aspx

He is now - was a microsoft MVP earlier - he was actually forced to drop his "MVP" on joining Google (IIRC).

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