Wow, Ruby keeps making noise. It seems to have gone over the tipping point in the past couple of years, into general acceptance.

Keep in mind this chart isn't a reflection of general language popularity. The Github founders are well known Rubyists - that alone helped influence Git & Github's popularity in the Ruby community.

Also mercurial is more popular with the Python community so they are underrepresented.

Judging by the numbers, the Python community as a whole vastly prefers Git. Check the total # of projects at BitBucket vs # of Python projects on GitHub for example.

Edit: No idea why this is getting downvoted. I'm just saying look at the numbers — 77,000 Python projects on GitHub vs. 53,000 public projects on BitBucket. You can disagree with other Python devs using Git, but the numbers are there.

This number can be deceiving. We are a 100% mercurial shop, yet all our repos are mirrored on github with hg-git. All this without ever having to deal with git.

Why do you mirror to github and not bitbucket?

The github web interface is lightyears ahead of bitbucket's or any other sites. So even if you are choosing to use mercurial or god-forbid CVS, its best to mirror to github for public sharing.

Bitbucket is in fact our primary code hosting service. We use github as a mirror of that.

We mirror to github for the social and discovery benefits. The UI has very little to do with it as far as I'm concerned.

I prefer projects on Github because of the superior UI. Github positions the code front-and-center, and makes it very easy to browse through it online without having to download the entire file.

Additionally, the front-page shows code up top and readme right below.

Bitbucket projects often show an empty wiki, or worse a useless "overview" that just tells when the commits to the project occurred.

The social and discovery benefits of Github are directly related to its UI (or if you prefer, call it UX since its all encompassing).

To follow up with another anecdote: Every time I'm browsing some random Python module documentation, it's almost always on Github.

Although I have to admit, I just love this line: "the most prominent project language on GitHub? Everything else".

"Everything else" is 560,000, Ruby alone is 225,000, which is 40% of the "Everything else" category, and 25% of the entire service. That spells "prominent" in my (and probably others') book.

I realise that for marketing reasons they don't want to portray themselves as a Ruby shop, but you can't say "Many people assume GitHub is filled with Ruby and Javascript projects", then show such a clear-cut graph, and try to hand-wave it away.

I also can't, for the life of me, understand why there is no link to Git, the actual tool the service revolves around, on the front page, or any of the pages linked from the front page.

I do wish there was a way to override github's automatic language detection for a project. I have seen many projects mislabeled as one language when that language was only used as some utility tool or test script.

The number of projects using javascript as the primary language seems odd. I am not sure how they determine the primary language, but does anyone else think it may be skewed (larger) since many projects host their javascript libraries and often in both minimized and dev formats?

We ignore libraries.

People consistently underestimate how much Javascript they're writing. Most modern web apps are (rightfully!) Javascript projects.

I've seen github count jquery other libs as javascript several times. There's no real solution to this as far as I can tell, since JS libs just can't be required like other libs.

We ignore a lot of paths when we count lines of code: https://gist.github.com/933716. Put your stuff in sensible directories, and you can minimize bad guesses.

I believe we inflate coffeescript scores, so that repos that include the compiled javascript show up as coffeescript.

I wonder how many are paid repositories?

I pay my $12/month. I used to keep my git repos on another server but it's less effort, easier to share, and easier to access from github. pg should create a field for github/repo in our profiles. Here's my acct: https://github.com/melling

> pg should create a field for github/repo in our profiles.

He did - there's a big textarea where you can put that and whatever else you want.

Exactly. I got bored one day and stuck all this in my about field:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mike-cardwell

I'm paying $22/month (medium plan) and have no private repos left. The next plan would be business gold for $100/month with 50 private repos. Which is a little over the top for me.

I guess I'll have to opensource more stuff to make room for TOP SECRET projects ;)

my acc: https://github.com/jsz

Go for legacy large plan - you will get 50 private repos for $50/month. https://github.com/account/billing?plan=large

oO is that a "secret" link? The large option just doesn't show up for me unless I visit your link.

A little over 180,000 are private repos

Does that include private gists?

Well technically... we have 0 paid gists :)

Nope