
Language complexity, measured by how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has - acidflask
https://gist.github.com/jiahao/8b19775cee3a6d51706acf0a8c0ec376
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dietrichepp
I love these metrics that are 99% meaningless but you still want to know how
your language compares. Like average identifier length, source tree directory
depth, etc.

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sdesol
If you are into novelty metrics, you might find the following interesting:

[http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm](http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm)

It shows how actively the gitignore files are modified.

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cloverich
"Novelty Metrics" \-- I kind of want to put that on my resume just to see what
happens with it. Or, I could imagine an entertaining blog existing solely
based on that premise.

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kbenson
You might really enjoy the Strange Maps[1] section of bigthink.com. There are
some real wonderful ones in the past entries. I have this in my feed, but look
at it far too infrequently for how interesting it looks.

1: [http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-
maps](http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-maps)

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mpermar
A more accurate way imho to see this data is: "Tooling support, measured by
how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has"

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ChemicalWarfare
exactly. tooling and framework config files. for 'pre-compiled' languages also
build dirs but that doesn't necessarily mean the language is more complex.

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czardoz
This measures the number of rules in .gitignore files, not language
complexity.

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deathanatos
In Github's .gitignore template, too.

For example, most of the entries in the Python one are utterly inane, and
won't apply to your project. You can easily trim that file to 1/5 it's size.
It includes the ignores for a bunch of directories I've never see any project
ever have, two unit test frameworks, two web frameworks, pip's files that are
already better covered by virtualenv ignores, _four_ different ways of naming
your virtualenvs…

This isn't measuring language complexity; this is someone trying to pre-cover
any potential case generated by any popular-today third party library.

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danielbarla
The visual studio one seems to cover just about every way you could use VS,
and every plugin made for it. This measurement comments more on the neatness
of the IDE(s) than any kind of language complexity.

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paulirwin
Agreed. VS supports dozens of languages across web, desktop, mobile, etc. C#,
VB, F#, C, C++, JavaScript, T-SQL, Python... and that's just what I can list
off the top of my head. Even with single languages in the list it's not
apples-to-apples. "Language complexity" should be removed from the link title.

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SeriousM
Oh my dear... That's so pointless... It's like judging your intelect depending
on the amount you dump every day.

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MAGZine
Interesting, though especially for the entries in the list that are
frameworks, you could conceivably just bury all of the ugly stuff in a
`framework` folder, and have only one ignore.

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zamalek
Visual Studio seems to be moving in this direction: I've noticed a .vs folder
and the .suo seems to live in it for now. I guess more and more will be moved
into it as time goes on, but considering the .gitignore contains VS6 ignores
we'll probably be stuck with the large file forever.

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KingMob
I'm not at all surprised Magento is number 3. I've never seen anything so
simultaneously overly- and poorly-engineered.

It's like someone combined the worst parts of 10-year-old Java (XML
configurations over conventions, AbstractEntityBeanFactory-style classes) and
PHP (no namespace, autoloading override plugins) into one awful mess. Throw in
the use of EAV everywhere, and the "schema" is a nightmare to decipher.

Maybe version 2 fixes some of these issues, but Magento 1.x is awful.

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DCoder
Magento 2 fixes the "no namespace" issue. Everything else is still there, and
some parts are taken to eleven.

A while ago, I ran PHPStorm's code inspections against Magento 1.x core code,
and the result wasn't very encouraging:
[https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR](https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR)

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ramenmeal
TIL visual studio is a language.

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koder2016
Most developers don't know the difference between IDE, language, library,
framework, platform and technology.

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Luyt
You got downvoted for your sarcasm, but you have a point. Some people think
that Ruby classes are instantiated using the _create_ method.

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pmontra
Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Looking at them, half
of the files makes sense, the other half is really project and dev env
dependent and they don't seem to be made for the same environment. Hardly
comparable.

[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Ruby.gitigno...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Ruby.gitignore)

[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Rails.gitign...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Rails.gitignore)

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krzrak
> Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Is there really a
> difference between 25 and 23?

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HugoDaniel
Why no JavaScript ?

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petetnt
There's really no common patterns of just plain JavaScript files being ignored
(to some extend, other cases are mostly covered by the `node` file).

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vorg
Looks like a similar situation with Apache Groovy. Only "grails" and "gradle"
are in there.

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oneloop
What a useless exercise. It seems to me that we're seeming more and more of
these irrelevant posts hitting the front page.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Be the change you want to see in this forum.

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emodendroket
How do you propose he prevents inane content from being upvoted by others?

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GFK_of_xmaspast
If oneloop doesn't like the submissions that have been made, oneloop (who
appears to have submitted a total of "2" links in their posting history)
should submit more of the kind of things they feel is appropriate.

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oneloop
Sure, if everyone submitted lots of good stuff it would be less likely that
we'd see this garbage on the front page. But for me individually to make a
difference I would have to come up with insane amounts of stuff myself. I
don't have time for that. If I find good stuff sure, I'll share it. But if
you're suggesting that I should spend more of my time looking for good stuff
around the web for the sole purpose of helping out the quality of an
aggregator website, you got another thing coming.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
You seem to be ok with spending more of your time complaining about it.

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leecarraher
at least it has a nice power-law distribution. otherwise pretty useless...

