Programming Language Diversity On the Rise 177
jfruh writes: "As GitHub becomes an increasingly common repository of project code, the metadata for projects saved there can tell us a lot about the state of the industry. In particular, a look at the programming languages used over the past half-decade shows an increasingly fragmented landscape, in which the overall share of most major languages is on a slight decline, while less-used languages are seeing modest growth in usage."
Selection bias much? (Score:5, Informative)
Eh.. not really (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure this tells us much about the state of the industry. More like the state of the industry for projects that are allowed to have the source posted online. In my area at least, the popularity of tags on StackOverflow seems to be a better indication of the industry: http://stackoverflow.com/tags
GitHub's language ID can be misleading (Score:5, Informative)
For example if you have a Python project, but it has an example web demo, and the web frontend for the demo uses jQuery, suddenly you have a giant pile of JavaScript code in your repository. So much of it that GitHub often identifies the project as JS, even though it's really a Python project that just has a JS library buried in the examples/ directory.
Of course in some ideal world you wouldn't have third-party library dependencies actually checked into your repository. But it's common to include any JS libraries your HTML documentation/demos/etc. need, because that lets the HTML be viewable and work correctly straight out of the repository (including offline).
"Diversity"? (Score:2, Informative)
99% of them are basically the same only slightly different structure. Programming languages are like novels; "ME TOO! I MADE ONE TOO!". What we need the least is more "diversity" when most of it is just dialects that increases the chance of errors and makes life harder for people.