NodeJS is now the most popular repository on Github

by _mnjb • 15 years ago

98 36 15 years ago

ryanfitz• 15 years ago

Looking at that listing the more amazing stat is that twitter bootstrap is #3. That was just released a few months ago and is "simply" an html ui framework. I think this highlights that over anything else, what most developers really need is a solid web ui to get started with.

ergo143• 15 years ago

It just shows that people hype on everything and follow like sheep - doesn't matter if they need particular project or not. Developers are no exception it seems...

hello_moto5• 15 years ago

At the same time, it also shows that developers or hackers are no different that consultants that keep selling new methodologies.

Our products are new programming languages, new patterns, new programming paradigm.

phillmv4• 15 years ago

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but Bootstrap is also relatively unique.

We've had css frameworks before, but they were usually concerned with letting you position things along a grid structure.

The great thing about Bootstrap is that it provides you with a full complement of UI "widgets" that look reasonably good, filled in a page chocked full of examples.

We have a good designer on staff and so we were slowly starting to build something along these lines, but standardizing on Bootstrap has saved such enormous quantities of time I can't recommend it enough. I've used it on two or three projects already and it makes me happy inside.

bergie• 15 years ago

Yep, we also use Bootstrap quite heavily for the web-based business apps we build for our clients. Makes it easy to build standardized and pretty interfaces.

Previously we were following jQuery UI themes, but Bootstrap is better in that it provides very nice defaults for many different types of content.

bascule• 15 years ago

Just to show how Github watchers correlate to real-world popularity, my now-defunct programming language Reia is the #3 most watched Erlang project on Github, ahead of projects like Riak and RabbitMQ:

https://github.com/languages/erlang

wslh• 15 years ago

Also we can compare with StackOverflow tags followers:

- C# 22.2K followers

- NodeJS 2.2K followers

blacksmythe• 15 years ago

I think having 10% as many StackOverflow followers as for C# is a big win for an emerging technology.

senthilnayagam2• 15 years ago

congrats to nodejs , it is the shiny new thing, but it is still not there yet

rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later

in terms of forks nodejs is half the popularity of rails, but I wish more contributors for nodejs

damncabbage• 15 years ago

  rails is lot older and it came to github when forking
  was the norm , watching came lot later

Aha! So is that why there are so many accounts that just contain forked repositories with no further commits?

(I suppose it was a heavy form of bookmarking something.)

senthilnayagam2• 15 years ago

Git workflow is evolving, and github in its forefront

If you want to compare on contributors Rails would again beat most open source projects , I remember seeing that number well above 1000

jurre• 15 years ago

I often fork repos to remind myself that I want to contribute to it, but then don't find the time to get started on it. I can imagine there being more people doing that.

skrebbel2• 15 years ago

Call me a cynic, but how is this relevant? Everybody knows that Node is popular. It's like adding "Rihanna scores #1 hit record" as a news item.

hello_moto5• 15 years ago

I find the example fits nicely. Rihanna and Node.

FWIW, I think Node is a great way to teach, explore, and learn JavaScript without the browser. It helps me learn modern JS techniques quickly. But Node powering my web-server? Like Rihanna...

PS: Check out this free online book: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ big props to the author. He's done a great job teaching modern JS.

phillmv4• 15 years ago

You are being non sensical. Does Rihanna respond to HTTP verbs?

I like Node insofar as it distracts hate away from the Ruby community, but c'mon now.

maximusprime• 15 years ago

A lot of HN stories are there to tell us what is fashionable and what is not. If it weren't for stories like this, how would I know what technologies to use! </sarcasm>

muppetman• 15 years ago

Silverlight was very popular when it was first released too.

dchest• 15 years ago

Are you sure?

coreyrecvlohe• 15 years ago

Silverlight was popular? When did this happen...

jemfinch• 15 years ago

This is a poor quality comment, not worth posting here.

lucian1900• 15 years ago

I think this is a little sad. Pragmatically, NodeJS is great. But the only reason it's popular is because browsers only run one (deeply flawed) language.

maxwell• 15 years ago

Remind me which existing language(s) aren't deeply flawed?

jjm• 15 years ago

Yeah seriously. The be all end all of languages has yet to arrive. Language and programming is an art, not some maximist metric. The Mona lisa is as flawed as JavaScript and every other language that exist.

terrellm• 15 years ago

I wonder how much of the popularity is because popularity was perhaps a goal of some of the NodeJS advocates. Recently I stumbled on http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com, which in the source at https://github.com/mmalecki/nodejs-vs-ror/blob/master/public... seems to imply beating Rails follow count was a goal. I'm not sure where I found the link but probably here on HN.

I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub."

I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.

mmalecki• 15 years ago

It's my project and it's purpose wasn't to beat Rails follow count, really.

As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit. It's also my first project using bootstrap.css.

It was a fun thing to hack on.

Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.

NodeJS is now the most popular repository on Github

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