
More Common Than You Think: An In-Depth Study of Casual Contributors [pdf] - ghlp
http://gustavopinto.org/lost+found/saner2016.pdf
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arcanus
Interesting study!

As a primary maintainer on some libraries and a casual contributer on others,
I'm not surprised at all to see that 48% of all contributions are from the
non-principle developers.

I was surprised to see that C and C++ are so low in terms of outside
contributions compared to many other languages. I don't believe this is due to
the number of programmers using the language, so it begs the question as to
why these languages are arguably less accessible.

I don't believe C/cpp are more syntactically difficult.

If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that C/C++ code are more often
specialized libraries that require system level access, and so don't attract
as much of a broad interest.

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rando289
Your 48% is very wrong. From the abstract:

"Our results showed that although casual contributors are rather common
(48.98% of the whole population of contributors in the projects analyzed),
they are responsible for only 1.73% of the total number of commits."

~~~
bluejekyll
It's worth noting that the 1.73%, are also the overlooked or edge case issues
that directly effected that developers use case.

It might be a low percentage, but maybe it's the areas where portability and
conformance with other libraries are important. The stuff that a core
maintainer is less interested in identifying and fixing, because they are
already using the library for their particular use case.

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mlinksva
Interesting paper. Casual contributor is very narrowly defined: made 1 (one)
commit only. Would be interesting how some slightly less limited definition
would change results, or not.

The analysis also excludes all contributions not in the form of commits. Of
course including non-commit contributions is hard.

One minor nit: C is characterized as "strongly typed".

