Why most popular GitHub repos are all web related?

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2473298/application-development/120001-GitHub-s-top-10-rock-star-projects.html#slide1

by onderkalaci • 11 years ago

25 41 11 years ago

computerworld.com

teddyh5• 11 years ago

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.

onderkalaci2• 11 years ago

I don't agree with it. There are many other projects that many web developers use. For instance: editors, databases, linux utility tools and so.

lmm• 11 years ago

Sure, but 100% of web developers need web stuff, whereas not all of them use a database, not all of them use linux, and so on.

talles4• 11 years ago

"Web users, that is, who also are git users – i.e. most likely programmers."

Who on earth would be a programmer and git user and not be a "web user"?

teddyh5• 11 years ago

By “web user” I meant people who are comfortable using web sites as applications. I should probably have made that clearer.

HeyLaughingBoy• 11 years ago

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.

teddyh5• 11 years ago

You seem to conflate “GitHub users” with “[people] who use git/source code control”. That is almost the opposite of a point that I wanted to make. It is obvious that GitHub would have many popular web projects, but if one could sum up git projects instead, this would probably not be the case.

pogden2• 11 years ago

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

skimmas• 11 years ago

september 2013

talles4• 11 years ago

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

dmamills• 11 years ago

most popular

teddyh5• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

talles4• 11 years ago

The guy took out the web programming language (JavaScript) out of the web browser (V8), sprinkled with OS stuff (libuv) and there you have it, a complete programming platform a la Java, .NET, Ruby, (insert more examples here).

Node became my vanilla language nowadays. Countless are the CLI utilities that I made/use that are written with it (I practically don't write shell scripts anymore).

And of course, don't forget that networking is broader than internet which is broader than web. I'm solely talking about web here.

pepijndevos• 11 years ago

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.

lfowles• 11 years ago

I suspect it's more that if you build websites you are more familiar with github.

ionised• 11 years ago

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.

M8• 11 years ago

Web is independent, thus making tools for it is both no one's and everyone's concern.

Mobile/desktop platform providers on the other hand are typically worried about developer experience and thus e.g. you get XAML/QT instead of patching HTML with Bootstrap.

Sir_Cmpwn3• 11 years ago

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 - 724 stars

https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS - 513 stars

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.

onderkalaci2• 11 years ago

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

Sir_Cmpwn3• 11 years ago

at least by my terms

maccard• 11 years ago

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

cwyers• 11 years ago

I feel like RedditSharp is pretty focused on the web.

Sir_Cmpwn3• 11 years ago

Good point. I guess the distinction I had in mind is that it doesn't run in the browser and doesn't serve HTML, but you're right that it is pretty web focused.

earless1• 11 years ago

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.

freshyill• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

tcfunk• 11 years ago

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

tommyd• 11 years ago

Ad impressions

ihuman• 11 years ago

And also a higher total page view count.

chollier• 11 years ago

" 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?

felipebueno• 11 years ago

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?

heyalexej• 11 years ago

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

Why most popular GitHub repos are all web related?

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