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Comment by draegtun | Hacker News Reader

Interesting stats but there are too many "assumptions" made on what they actually mean!

Interestingly the latest language stats from GitHub (http://github.com/languages) shows this:

  Ruby	        22%
  JavaScript	15%
  Perl	        14%
  Python	9%
  Shell	        7%
  C	        6%
  PHP	        6%
  Java	        4%
  C++	        4%
  Objective-C	2%

View on HN

For comparison, after eliminating projects with 3 or fewer watchers and duplicate projects, my language breakdown looks like this:

	 Ruby 35.3%
	 Python 11.5%
	 Javscript 9.4%
	 PHP 7.6%
	 C 5.4%
	 None 5.3%
	 Java 5.3%
	 C++ 4.0%
	 Objective C 3.8%
	 Perl 3.6%
	 C# 1.7%
	 Erlang 1.4%
	 ActionScript 1.3%
	 Scala 1.0%
	 Lua 0.9%
	 Clojure 0.7%
	 Lisp 0.6%
	 Haskell 0.5%
	 Go 0.5%
	 Objective J 0.3%

Pretty close to the overall estimate by github. Some of the difference can probably be explained by the fact that Github tried to eliminate commonly included libraries when they did their file line counts, while I didn't.

Ruby & Perl are currently at 21% & 18% respectively on Github, so it bears no resemblance to your figs.

I understand what you trying to do by eliminating projects with less than 4 watchers but this is arbitrary figure and the results you produced are therefore affected by this decision.

When you play with population samples then side effects can creep in. You can see this in the difference in Ruby being 35.3% in your figs and it being 21% on Github. Its a big difference and can possibly be explained by things like: http://www.ruby-toolbox.com/

War Perl!

Interesting to see how the Perl community has really hopped on the bandwagon. Happy to see it.

Yes the Perl community started to embrace Git & Github about a year ago.

When I started my Github account in Nov 2008, Perl only had around 1% of language metrics. It rose over the past year to 6% and recently jumped to 14% because of the BackPAN inclusion (http://github.com/gitpan/).

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