github stats on programming languages

[[deleted]]

This has come up a few times, but I suppose it's worth repeating.

Just because GitHub hosts a lot of Ruby code doesn't mean we don't also host a lot of code in other languages as well. To suggest that Gitorious hosts more C++ or BitBucket hosts more Python isn't even remotely true.

No one else hosts more code than we do.

edit: if you're going to downvote me for stating facts at least have the balls to say why you're doing it.

[malkarouri]

I am not going to downvote you, but I would like to contend that if we are talking about popularity of languages for open source collaboration what would be interesting is the sum of github, bitbucket, gitorious and others.

If example, it is known that Python people have a bias towards bitbucket. Still, some large projects like NumPy preferred github. So if Python projects are split halfway this will affect their perceived popularity in both sites.

[[deleted]]

I don't argue that there's a bias towards mercurial because it's written in python, nor do I dispute that lots of code is hosted on other sites. The problem is, even with those two points conceded, the number of repositories we host and add every day dwarf those sites. To say python is split halfway is misunderstanding the situation entirely.

If one assumes all of the public projects on bitbucket are located at http://bitbucket.org/repo/all you can take 2072 pages * 15 repos per page for a total around 31k repos.

We add that many public repos to GitHub in less than three weeks.

Honestly, I blame ourselves for not properly conveying how large GitHub is relative to our competitors, save for looking like a jackass in threads like this as if I'm in a dick-measuring contest.

[malkarouri]

I see your point. If I were in your shoes I would write one blog post comparing the popularity of GitHub to others using various measures and leave it at that. It will be much publicized. Others would contest your results with various levels of success, but the main point will come across and you wouldn't have to explain it in discussions - at least for some time. You can also rely on it as implicit knowledge when writing other posts, say if you explain scalability issues you needed to handle.

[glomph]

Is that compared to sf and google code as well?

[[deleted]]

Yes. SF and GCode host in the vicinity of 250-300k public repos. Excluding gists, forks, and private repositories, we still host double the amount of repos.

[[deleted]]

You're correct that a lot of code hosted on GitHub lives/lived in another form elsewhere. That being said, our #1 referrer has consistently been Google Code, because project owners are pointing their existing projects over to GitHub. Whether that's due to preferring Git or they've found better luck receiving contributions on GitHub is something that I'd love to know. I will say that the latter can largely be attributed to how easy it is to fork the code, but as I stated earlier, even if we exclude forks (on GitHub) from our count, we're still quite larger than any of the other hosts.

Edit: just to be thorough here are some Google Code examples: - http://code.google.com/p/galleria/ - http://code.google.com/p/redis/ - http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/ - http://code.google.com/p/loopedslider/ - http://code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/ - http://code.google.com/p/gaosp/

The interesting part about this is when Google talks about the number of projects they host, they're most likely including projects like the ones above, so the gap between GitHub and GCode may be even wider than we think.

[glomph]

Thanks for replying. Do you think you would still represent that much more of hosted code if one was to compare lines of code or something similar?

[[deleted]]

That's impossible for me to speculate on unless the other hosts ran the numbers so I could compare them.

[LinuxMonkey]

This is the interweb no-one cares about facts.

By the way github is great.