
On GitHub’s Programming Languages - jes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431
======
minimaxir
For whatever reason, GitHub Archive changed their data schema in 2015.
[https://www.githubarchive.org](https://www.githubarchive.org)

The new schema conveniently lacks a repository_language field, and is likely
the same reason the data in the paper abruptly stops at 2014. (Otherwise, I'd
try to reproduce this analysis myself)

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MichaelBurge
I'm surprised Go is #10. I don't actually know a single person who uses it. It
seems like more of a hipster language. The others all seem like reasonable
languages that occupy their niche in life.

For example, I'd expect C# to be more widely used than Go. Maybe the C# people
don't share their code on Github, though. Perl should also be more widely
used, though maybe that's all on CPAN.

~~~
altotrees
Sure, Go may still be surrounded by some hype, but I wouldn't call it a
hipster language. I started reading about it and messing around with it about
a year ago. It is really fun to use for certain things (usually Network
servers for me).

That is not to say it's a perfect language, but I have friends dedicated to
python who love using Go and friends who use C and Java that love building
personal projects with it. I really had no idea it was gaining adoption in
industry and some areas of academia until recently though.

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eevilspock
Interesting that Python is clustered as a "system oriented programming"
language. A lot of people use it for web dev (e.g. using Django or Flask).

~~~
giancarlostoro
I think of Python as programming language that lets me do anything from web,
shell scripts, games, and even server environments (Matrix is a decent
example). It's not my top language choice, but I still enjoy it as a scripting
language because it has many use cases. I'm sure Ruby could be seen in a
similar light as well, and maybe Perl as well.

~~~
coltonv
So, a general purpose language.

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mangeletti
Why is Python being relegated to "systems programming" along side C and C++?

There are probably literally millions of Python web apps out there, not to
mention sites like Instagram and YouTube running on Python. Python hasn't ever
really been a systems language.

~~~
civilian
It's not "relegated to", it's "best clustered into"

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kibwen
I didn't see this stated anywhere explicitly, but it looks like their Github
data ends at Dec 2014.

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cdnsteve
Some of the correlations are interesting and could be used for marketing
purposes.

Ruby: CSS is 25.76 Python: CSS is 15.75

Go is gaining fastest adoption from C, Ruby and Python developers.

~~~
wutf
TBH I can't remember the last time I saw non-normalized correlations in a
study and the paper lost some credibility.. who does that, and why? What does
a correlation of 25.76 mean? Relative to what? That's why you bound it 0 to 1.

~~~
minimaxir
Correlation is constrained to 0 and 1 as a side effect of the mathematics.

The definition of correlation mentioned in the paper makes zero sense
whatsoever and apparently invokes Bayes's rule?

~~~
TearsInTheRain
the correlation is that out of the people that program in language A, X% of
them also program in language B. This can also be expressed as given that
someone programs in language A, the probability that they program in language
B is X. It looks like the table is expressing the correlation in terms of %
even though they dont mention that on the table.

~~~
minimaxir
EDIT: I'm dumb

~~~
AnimalMuppet
_Because they 're percentages._

Or are any of them greater than 100?

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AnimalMuppet
Python is a systems programming language? What definition are you using where
that's reasonable?

~~~
bluetomcat
I guess "avoiding bash by using python" counts as systems programming :-)

~~~
skocznymroczny
I've seen vanilla JS described as "bare metal programming" a few times.

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dr_win
"GitHub is [...] distributed version control system.", hmm, well.

"Java Script" feels like spelling from 1995.

~~~
smitherfield
Are there any popular programming languages whose preferred written name
contains a space? Object Pascal and Visual Basic are the only ones that come
to mind. (Objective-C dodges it by a hair).

~~~
greggyb
Common Lisp. If you want to count things like <architecture> Assembly as
languages, e.g. x86 assembly.

~~~
jakub_h
There was also Component Pascal. And Franz Lisp, if you accept dialect names.
Also, OCaml used to be called Objective Caml, if I'm not mistaken.

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DannyBee
Sad that the data ends in 2014 :(

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esaym
Odd, they completely ignore Perl.

~~~
TearsInTheRain
They mentioned on page 4 of the paper that Perl ranks 17th by their criteria
of language popularity

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arthurcolle
anyone else viscerally bothered by the use of phylogenetic in the abstract?

~~~
dave2000
I was too busy being upset by how awful the site looks on mobile devices.

