• Popular Languages

    defunkt 24 Jun 2008

    We’re working on some awesome new visualizations and statistics here at GitHub. While they’re not quite ready to roll out, there is one chart I wanted to share.

    These are the top 10 languages stored on GitHub, based on some simple heuristics. Forks are not counted – only unique code.

  • Comments

    sprsquish Tue Jun 24 12:27:09 -0700 2008

    wonder if all that javascript is from duplicate libraries in application trees

    mattly Tue Jun 24 12:30:25 -0700 2008

    or all the php from that you have to write so much of it to do anything

    defunkt Tue Jun 24 12:41:45 -0700 2008
    @sprsquish We ignore any path with these terms in them:
        vendor
        jquery
        bundle
        cache
        prototype.js
        effects.js
        controls.js
        dragdrop.js
    
    sprsquish Tue Jun 24 13:26:00 -0700 2008

    @defunkt can you say in a little more detail how you came up with these numbers? Are you counting lines of code or just files? Mattly brings up a good point about the succinctness of different languages.

    defunkt Tue Jun 24 13:44:20 -0700 2008

    It’s lines of code per language on the site.

    defunkt Tue Jun 24 14:00:37 -0700 2008

    Keep in mind that Ruby, too, is grossly inflated due to all the unit tests and specs :)

    nnc Tue Jun 24 14:14:06 -0700 2008

    It would be interesting to see how many projects/repositories use which language in any way, regardless of number of files or loc.

    uggedal Tue Jun 24 14:14:40 -0700 2008

    @defunkt: Take Edward Tufte’s advice, don’t use pie charts for visualizing information. A bar chart is vastly superior when comparing values against each other.

    ryw Tue Jun 24 14:20:09 -0700 2008

    you shouldn’t count js lines that look like this :)

    }
    defunkt Tue Jun 24 14:38:04 -0700 2008

    Clarification: We count file size, not lines of code.

    defunkt Tue Jun 24 14:38:24 -0700 2008

    @uggedal Seems to get across the point just fine to me.

    defunkt Tue Jun 24 14:39:08 -0700 2008

    @nnc Agreed! Coming soon.

    joannou Tue Jun 24 15:20:08 -0700 2008

    Both file size and lines of code are unfair to terse languages. That said, I don’t know how else to measure. ;)

    PhilGeek Tue Jun 24 17:27:00 -0700 2008

    WRT pie charts vs bar charts, notice that PHP, Ruby, and C have pretty similar slices. Hard to tell by eyeballing whether they are the same or different. With a bar chart slight differences, if there are any, are immediately apparent.

    volh Wed Jul 16 11:11:41 -0700 2008

    I’m waiting for the new extended search with some kind of tags for language and status( alpha, beta, release, murdered etc ). For example, it’s quite hard to search projects written in Io, because of language name.

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