Why most popular GitHub repos are all web related? | Hacker News Reader

Why most popular GitHub repos are all web related?

computerworld.com

25 pointsonderkalaci41 comments

Why? Because the web is by far the largest platform. These are mostly versatile projects that suit a wide variety of needs for many different types of users. This is not a difficult question.

I would also like to point out that for a lot of "web projects", the entry and deployment barrier is relatively low, one can mostly try those out on a browser. I think this is another important reason for more popularity of web based projects.

That’s obvious to me. GitHub is a web application, catering to web users. Web users, that is, who also are git users – i.e. most likely programmers. Obviously they are going to write (and be involved in) web related projects on GitHub.

I don't agree with it. There are many other projects that many web developers use. For instance: editors, databases, linux utility tools and so.

Sure, but 100% of web developers need web stuff, whereas not all of them use a database, not all of them use linux, and so on.

"Web users, that is, who also are git users – i.e. most likely programmers."

Who on earth would be a programmer and git user and not be a "web user"?

By “web user” I meant people who are comfortable using web sites as applications. I should probably have made that clearer.

"comfortable using web sites as applications" I'm not sure that's even remotely clear.

A web application is an application whether or not you're comfortable with it.

The subset of "web users" who use git/source code control is almost 100% programmers, true. But the subset of programmers that are programming web apps most certainly isn't. I know a lot of programmers; I don't know a single web programmer.

You seem to conflate “GitHub users” with “[people] who use git/source code control”. That is almost the opposite of a point that I wanted to make. It is obvious that GitHub would have many popular web projects, but if one could sum up git projects instead, this would probably not be the case.

I'm curious, what communities and places do you know most of these developers from? And what sort of platforms do they work with?

Most programmers I know professionally and personally are working within variations on the theme of civil engineering, logistics, finance or telecom. Sure some of them occasionally write tools that are accessed via a web browser, but non of them would probably classify themselves as "web developers".

I see. This is similar to my experience. Most software is made for people to use at work, usually semi-custom. Most software also doesn't depend on low latency or high graphics throughout, so most applications, especially new ones, are web applications. Most of the developers I know that do similar work would call themselves "web developers" though that may be required to context. Someone might identify themselves as a web developer to me, a developer in an unrelated domain, but not to a non-developer in the domain.

I think it depends very much where the emphasis of your effort is spent. Are you writing an analysis tool and then putting up a web front end to show the results, or are you writing web front end to interact with an analysis tool.

Ugh, why must sites insist on putting all these list items on separate pages.

Ad impressions

And also a higher total page view count.

It's an old article from Sep 19, 2013. 26 popups you have to dodge to get to the slider that you have to click through with another 17 ads. This is the reward:

  1. Bootstrap
  2. Node.js
  3. JQuery
  4. HTML5 Boilerplate
  5. Ruby on Rails
  6. D3
  7. Impress.js
  8. Font Awesome
  9. Backbone.js
  10. Homebrew

With web projects there exists the potential to reach many more users than desktop and native projects. I would assume that the percentage of the population with access to a web browser is much much larger than any other segment.

It seems that most of the industry, or at least the parts that I frequent, are primarily building websites.

I'm trying to figure out where all the other programming is happening, but I have not had much luck.

I suspect it's more that if you build websites you are more familiar with github.

Industrial control systems and engineering simulation suites are my personal programming experience, so my work is all entirely back-end or desktop based development.

I know very little about web programming or website development to be honest although we are starting to offer some of our applications through web services so my knowledge in that area is due to begin increasing very soon as a necessity.

Web is independent, thus making tools for it is both no one's and everyone's concern.

Mobile/desktop platform providers on the other hand are typically worried about developer experience and thus e.g. you get XAML/QT instead of patching HTML with Bootstrap.

Repos that are not addressing the web can get popular (at least by my terms), just not _as_ popular. I have:

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft - 724 stars

https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS - 513 stars

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/RedditSharp - 195 stars

Some of these have web parts (i.e. a website) but none of them are focused on the web.

These stars counts are very low compared to the ones in the link.

>at least by my terms

There are plenty of projects out there with thousands of stars - https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh hsa 25k, the linux kernel has 25k stars

I feel like RedditSharp is pretty focused on the web.

Good point. I guess the distinction I had in mind is that it doesn't run in the browser and doesn't serve HTML, but you're right that it is pretty web focused.

Can't see any of the slides. Maybe some issue related to uBlock but I won't turn it off. Can I see it all in one page?

september 2013

I don't see Node.js and Homebrew as "web related".

most popular

How, exactly, is Node.js not web related? It is Javascript, a language which owes its entire creation and continous existence to its monopoly position in web browsers. True, Node.js is not run in web browser, but instead in… web servers.

Tell me again how Node.js is not web related?

(Homebrew is, quite as you say, not web related.)

It happens to be popular for server-side web development, but there's nothing inherent in it that forces you to use it for web.

Nothing web-related in this project, for example: https://github.com/neandrake/spirc

> requiring little or no dependencies

... except a several million line JIT

That (spirc) is a library. Are there actual applications of any significance written in Javascript which run in a web server (or browser) and do not use the web?

Even if there are, I still feel that Javascript is too completely dependent on its position in web browsers for Node.js to be entirely disassociated with the web. If a new language would replace Javascript in the browser, Node.js would be instantly abandoned. But I could see your point.

What about atom (https://github.com/atom/atom), a text editor?

Or npm (https://github.com/npm/npm), a package manager?

Atom runs as a Web app in Electron (formerly atom-shell), which is basically a stripped-down version of the Chromium browser combined with Node.js and some additions to ease interop between the Web app and the host OS.

Npm uses Web protocols (HTTP, maybe JSON-RPC) to communicate with repository servers.

This is not saying that there aren't any non-web applications using Node.js, just that web-related applications using Node.js are quite numerous and popular.

Personally I know of Node.js applications and libraries targeting robotics, computer vision, language analysis, neural networks and more. Like any powerful platform, much of this relies on the ability of Node.js to interface with external libraries, which it does using wrappers built with node-gyp.

The guy took out the web programming language (JavaScript) out of the web browser (V8), sprinkled with OS stuff (libuv) and there you have it, a complete programming platform a la Java, .NET, Ruby, (insert more examples here).

Node became my vanilla language nowadays. Countless are the CLI utilities that I made/use that are written with it (I practically don't write shell scripts anymore).

And of course, don't forget that networking is broader than internet which is broader than web. I'm solely talking about web here.

" Hoffman also notes hosting Node.js on GitHub gives people the power to fork it -- there have been many forks but not one that has emerged as a separate project."

Hmm what?

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