
Why most popular GitHub repos are all web related? - onderkalaci
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2473298/application-development/120001-GitHub-s-top-10-rock-star-projects.html#slide1
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freshyill
Why? Because the web is by far the largest platform. These are mostly
versatile projects that suit a wide variety of needs for many different types
of users. This is not a difficult question.

~~~
aaggarwal
I would also like to point out that for a lot of "web projects", the entry and
deployment barrier is relatively low, one can mostly try those out on a
browser. I think this is another important reason for more popularity of web
based projects.

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teddyh
That’s obvious to me. GitHub is a web application, catering to web users. Web
users, that is, who also are git users – i.e. most likely programmers.
Obviously they are going to write (and be involved in) web related projects on
GitHub.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The subset of "web users" who use git/source code control is almost 100%
programmers, true. But the subset of programmers that are programming web apps
most certainly isn't. I know a lot of programmers; I don't know a single web
programmer.

~~~
pogden
I'm curious, what communities and places do you know most of these developers
from? And what sort of platforms do they work with?

~~~
dagw
Most programmers I know professionally and personally are working within
variations on the theme of civil engineering, logistics, finance or telecom.
Sure some of them occasionally write tools that are accessed via a web
browser, but non of them would probably classify themselves as "web
developers".

~~~
pogden
I see. This is similar to my experience. Most software is made for people to
use at work, usually semi-custom. Most software also doesn't depend on low
latency or high graphics throughout, so most applications, especially new
ones, are web applications. Most of the developers I know that do similar work
would call themselves "web developers" though that may be required to context.
Someone might identify themselves as a web developer to me, a developer in an
unrelated domain, but not to a non-developer in the domain.

~~~
dagw
I think it depends very much where the emphasis of your effort is spent. Are
you writing an analysis tool and then putting up a web front end to show the
results, or are you writing web front end to interact with an analysis tool.

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tcfunk
Ugh, why must sites insist on putting all these list items on separate pages.

~~~
tommyd
Ad impressions

~~~
ihuman
And also a higher total page view count.

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heyalexej
It's an old article from Sep 19, 2013. 26 popups you have to dodge to get to
the slider that you have to click through with another 17 ads. This is the
reward:

    
    
      1. Bootstrap
      2. Node.js
      3. JQuery
      4. HTML5 Boilerplate
      5. Ruby on Rails
      6. D3
      7. Impress.js
      8. Font Awesome
      9. Backbone.js
      10. Homebrew

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earless1
With web projects there exists the potential to reach many more users than
desktop and native projects. I would assume that the percentage of the
population with access to a web browser is much much larger than any other
segment.

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pepijndevos
It seems that most of the industry, or at least the parts that I frequent, are
primarily building websites.

I'm trying to figure out where all the other programming is happening, but I
have not had much luck.

~~~
ionised
Industrial control systems and engineering simulation suites are my personal
programming experience, so my work is all entirely back-end or desktop based
development.

I know very little about web programming or website development to be honest
although we are starting to offer some of our applications through web
services so my knowledge in that area is due to begin increasing very soon as
a necessity.

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Sir_Cmpwn
Repos that are not addressing the web can get popular (at least by my terms),
just not _as_ popular. I have:

[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft)
\- 724 stars

[https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS](https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS)
\- 513 stars

[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/RedditSharp](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/RedditSharp)
\- 195 stars

Some of these have web parts (i.e. a website) but none of them are focused on
the web.

~~~
onderkalaci
These stars counts are very low compared to the ones in the link.

~~~
maccard
There are plenty of projects out there with thousands of stars -
[https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-
zsh](https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh) hsa 25k, the linux kernel has
25k stars

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felipebueno
Can't see any of the slides. Maybe some issue related to uBlock but I won't
turn it off. Can I see it all in one page?

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skimmas
september 2013

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talles
I don't see Node.js and Homebrew as "web related".

~~~
teddyh
How, exactly, is Node.js _not_ web related? It is Javascript, a language which
owes its entire creation and continous existence to its monopoly position in
web browsers. True, Node.js is not run in web browser, but instead in… web
servers.

Tell me again how Node.js is not web related?

(Homebrew is, quite as you say, not web related.)

~~~
QuercusMax
It happens to be popular for server-side web development, but there's nothing
inherent in it that forces you to use it for web.

Nothing web-related in this project, for example:
[https://github.com/neandrake/spirc](https://github.com/neandrake/spirc)

~~~
teddyh
That (spirc) is a _library_. Are there actual _applications_ of any
significance written in Javascript which run in a web server (or browser) and
do not use the web?

Even if there are, I still feel that Javascript is too completely dependent on
its position in web browsers for Node.js to be entirely disassociated with the
web. If a new language would replace Javascript in the browser, Node.js would
be instantly abandoned. But I could see your point.

~~~
talles
What about atom
([https://github.com/atom/atom](https://github.com/atom/atom)), a text editor?

Or npm ([https://github.com/npm/npm](https://github.com/npm/npm)), a package
manager?

~~~
ackalker
Atom runs as a Web app in Electron (formerly atom-shell), which is basically a
stripped-down version of the Chromium browser combined with Node.js and some
additions to ease interop between the Web app and the host OS.

Npm uses Web protocols (HTTP, maybe JSON-RPC) to communicate with repository
servers.

This is not saying that there aren't any non-web applications using Node.js,
just that web-related applications using Node.js are quite numerous and
popular.

Personally I know of Node.js applications and libraries targeting robotics,
computer vision, language analysis, neural networks and more. Like any
powerful platform, much of this relies on the ability of Node.js to interface
with external libraries, which it does using wrappers built with node-gyp.

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chollier
" Hoffman also notes hosting Node.js on GitHub gives people the power to fork
it -- there have been many forks but not one that has emerged as a separate
project."

Hmm what?

