

6 dominant languages on code forges: C++, Java, Python, C, Javascript & Ruby - olifante
http://www.slideshare.net/sogrady/survival-of-the-forges

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mechanical_fish
As a Drupal developer, I'm well aware of the enormous sample bias inherent in
this study: Drupal folks don't commit PHP to code forges because they commit
it to Drupal.org, which built its own code forge back in the mid-2000s and has
a community culture that strongly encourages its use.

Similarly, Wordpress runs a plugin repository where the Wordpress folks
probably keep most of their code.

Meanwhile, this study also doesn't count CPAN as a code forge, so pitchfork-
wielding Perl programmers will be arriving on this thread in 3...2...1 seconds
to make this argument again, only in a _much stronger_ form. Only a fraction
of PHP programming involves Drupal or Wordpress, but my impression is that
nearly everything that gets done in Perl is eligible for CPAN, which has been
around longer than any of Github, SourceForge, Google Code or CodePlex.

~~~
olifante
But that's part of the point, isn't it? The very fact that Drupal folks prefer
to live in their own isolated code community could indicate a degree of
provincialism.

~~~
olifante
The study also left out Bitbucket, which I'm sure still attracts a decent
amount of Python projects (Mercurial is written in Python and was blessed by
Guido as the preferred SCM). Yet that doesn't seem to have prevented Python
from coming out strong in the comparison.

------
sogrady
[Disclosure: I'm the author of the deck]

Lots of constructive feedback on the slides. To the questions of the forges
included in the study, we were going off of the snapshot of data that Black
Duck had available. Because it isn't randomly sampled, it can't be considered
representative of the industry as a whole. This is why you don't see any, for
example, over-representation of the underperformance of PHP relative to
competitive runtimes: this isn't broadly representative, and therefore those
type of conclusions aren't justified.

Instead, we're looking at specific trends within the forges studied from an
observational study perspective. Which tells us something about
diversification as well as forge performance relative to one another. Nothing
more, nothing less.

All of that said, I certainly hope we can expand the number of forges studied
in future. Bitbucket in particular is of interest to me.

------
olifante
the 3rd slide shows the total number of commits per language on popular code
hosting sites. To my eyes, there is a distinct split between 1st tier
languages (C++, Java, Python, C, Javascript and Ruby) and 2nd tier languages
(C#, Perl and PHP).

