Ruby is the most popular language at Github by far. Compare that with the questions at Stack Overflow or the TIOBE index.
What is the reason for this difference in relative popularity in different places?
+10
A:
Ruby specific features such as GEM building and distribution. When developers install a GEM they become aware of Github.
This years Rails Rumble was integrated with github.
Rails, Merb, and Adhearsion and other trend setting projects moved to Github a while ago.
jrhicks
2009-10-19 01:52:01
+27
A:
It's just that it's got a lot of mindshare in the Ruby community for a variety of reasons
- The Ruby on Rails source code is hosted on Github.
- Github itself is built with RoR (in part)
- A few of the Github team are active in the Ruby community and associated open source projects.
madlep
2009-10-19 01:59:06
+8
A:
- Github was made with RoR
- Then RoR migrated from Trac SVN to Github
- Then every other project that revolves around RoR (especially Rails plugins) follows.
- Then every other project that uses Ruby (eventhough it's not really specifically related to Rails) comes along
But it is interesting how Ruby hasn't yet use Git for their source control.
jpartogi
2009-10-19 02:38:33
A:
Ruby is mostly adopted by people who like shiny new things, and GitHub is still a shiny new thing. You'll find that those of us working on the web (and especially with scripting languages) are always dissatisfied with the current state of things, and are looking for things like github to provide pretty graphs and whatnot, while oldschool C hackers are perfectly content with cvs and sourceforge. It's a difference in cultures.
As far as Ruby, specifically, there is obviously the RoR influence, and the gem mirror was useful before gemcutter came around. You don't tend to see many Pythonistas on there, however, because they value extreme simplicity (a lot of Pythonistas tend to be linux+vim users, as opposed to mac+textmate for ruby), and they just drop things off at google code. The Ruby community values prettiness (that's what makes Ruby Ruby, after all), and so they use big-button webapps like github.
Xiong Chiamiov
2009-11-03 20:05:38
Dude, that's a bit harsh. Some of us value flexibility, and can be interested in both Ruby *and* Python.
Roboprog
2009-11-03 20:23:02
Save typcasting for the code...
Zach
2009-11-06 03:02:05
Oh hey, negative points are awesome! It wasn't my intent to rag on members of either community, as I enjoy both languages myself. It's from my observations of both that I came to these conclusions; sure, they're stereotypes, but stereotypes are useful, y'know?
Xiong Chiamiov
2009-11-14 11:29:25
I agree that this answer is a bit harsh, but there's definitely at least some truth to it. In my experience the Ruby community tends to breed early adopters that aren't satisfied with the status quo and are always looking for a way to further improve things. But while this can have its downsides (proliferation of test frameworks for example), I would argue that it's overall a beneficial trait.
Mirko Froehlich
2009-12-12 17:37:14
As far as I know about half of the Ruby community uses Textmate. Most of the remaining Rubists use VIM, and then emacs. Although there might be some "truth" in your answer, but it is full of stereotypes. Smells like cyber-nationalism.
fifigyuri
2010-01-18 07:30:02
50% is incredibly significant, and most of the Rubyists I know using vim or emacs are still Mac users. ;) On the we-like-shiny-new-things front, the Perl community isn't moving away from CPAN any time soon, and neither are Pythonistas leaving PyPi, but gemcutter came along and replaced rubyforge's gem service almost overnight!
Xiong Chiamiov
2010-01-18 09:52:33
+6
A:
The Ruby community was the first to really start adopting git full force (outside of the Linux core team). GitHub was originally aimed at that community. It's only been the past 6 months or so that they've started to see such a large adoption by programmers in other languages.
Also, where a large portion of Rubyists prefer Git, a lot of Python developers would rather use Mercurial (a similar, yet different SCM). The release of the Mercurial-Git bridge has helped bring those users over as well; at least, the ones who want to use GitHub.
Joe Fiorini
2009-11-06 03:22:14
+1
A:
Could C# be less into open source software than ruby?
One thing I noticed with the github graph is that javascript and scripting languages combined make up 75% of the total.
Andrew Grimm
2009-12-12 12:08:05