Githut – Programming Languages and Github (2014)

Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago

tonyhb

85 points

32 comments

githut.infoTech Discussionstory

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GithubProgramming LanguagesData Visualization

Key topics

Github

Programming Languages

Data Visualization

The GitHut site is making waves with its insightful analysis of programming languages on GitHub, sparking curiosity about the state of coding trends back in 2014. Although the original comments are nowhere to be found, the site itself remains a fascinating snapshot of the GitHub ecosystem at the time. The data likely continues to influence discussions around language popularity and developer preferences, offering a nostalgic glimpse into the past. This retro tech snapshot remains relevant today, as developers and researchers still reference historical data to understand the evolution of coding landscapes.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

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Peak period

0-1h

Avg / period

3.5

Comment distribution21 data points

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Based on 21 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Nov 20, 2025 at 4:33 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Nov 20, 2025 at 4:43 PM EST
10m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
12 comments in 0-1h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Nov 20, 2025 at 10:49 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (32 comments)

Showing 21 comments of 32

miguel_martin

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Why are Nim, Odin, Zig, Mojo not included (and probably many others)?

some_guy_nobel

about 2 months ago

Probably because this was made in 2014 :D

jtwaleson

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Would love to see an update to 2025

tonyhbAuthor

about 2 months ago

I really, really want this updated too and saw it in my bookmarks. Figured the historic data was interesting, and that someone might want to give this another go.

kodablah

about 2 months ago

2 replies

I think correlating "pushes per repository" to certain languages is interesting. The top "pushes per repository" are C++, TeX, Rust, C, and CSS. I guess it's no surprise many would also consider those the most guess-and-check or hard-to-get-right-upfront-without-tooling languages too.

IshKebab

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Really? I don't think Rust is like that because it has such strong compile time checking. More likely because Rust 1.0 hadn't even been released in 2014 so by definition every Rust project was extremely new and active.

kodablah

about 2 months ago

Yes, maybe the causation assumption here is inaccurate.

Etheryte

about 2 months ago

It's unclear if that's the takeaway here. Pushes per repository can just as well indicate a project that's just old, or active, or popular, or etc.

ivanjermakov

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Would be fun to weight each language by average number of stars, but normalize by repository count.

Data analysys without adjusting groups by popularity is a bit lame.

clircle

about 2 months ago

What statistic are you proposing? Number of repos / avg stars ?

ethmarks

about 2 months ago

2 replies

Absolutely stunning and ingenious visualization, but disappointing data. In 2014 there were 2.2 million repos, while in 2025 there are closer to 500 million. The repo was last updated seven years ago, so I assume that this project has been abandoned.

A cursory glance at the source code[1] reveals that it's using GitHub Archive data. Looking through the gharchive data[2], it seems like it was last updated in 2024. So there's 10 years of publicly accessible new data.

Is there any reason we (by "we" I mean "random members of the community" as opposed to the developer of the project) can't re-build GitHut with the new data, seeing as it's open source? It's only processing the repo metadata, meaning it shouldn't even be that much data and should be well under the free 1TB limit in BigQuery (The processed data from 2014 stored in the repo[3] is only 71MB in size, though I assume the 2024 data will be larger), so cost shouldn't be a concern.

I'm not experienced enough to know whether creating an updated version of this would take an afternoon or several weeks.

[1]: https://github.com/littleark/githut/

[2]: https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?project=githubarch...

[3]: https://github.com/littleark/githut/blob/master/server/data/...

nightpool

about 2 months ago

Apparently someone worked on it, but (IMO) the visualization is a lot less nice compared to the original: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

flymasterv

about 2 months ago

GHArchive is updated constantly, but the tables reflect COMPLETED time periods. So there’s no yearly/2025, yet. You have to look at the monthlies.

Source: just left GOOG after 5 years on the GitHub tooling team.

steveklabnik

about 2 months ago

1 reply

As noted, should be (2014).

There is also GitHut 2.0: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

This updates through 2024.

nightpool

about 2 months ago

2 replies

Interesting to see the number of JS pushes go down significantly, but actually realize that it's just because many more projects are using TypeScript:

https://i.imgur.com/AJBE9so.png

threatofrain

about 2 months ago

The library space converged to TS far faster than the rest of the JS world. Also interesting to see the sharp rise of Go.

oceansky

about 2 months ago

If you sum both, it's 17.204%, which would place it at the top.

irfn

about 2 months ago

1995 was a busy year in new programming languages!

jonny_eh

about 2 months ago

Wow, 1995 was a stacked year for languages: JavaScript, Java, Ruby, PHP

into_ruin

about 2 months ago

This may be a stupid question, but if most iOS apps are written in Swift, why isn't Swift more popular? Is it just because most Swift projects aren't FOSS?

akerl_

about 2 months ago

The connectors are interesting, but I wish there was a way to sort by a column and have the rows be actually linear.

Also, worth noting that it looks like this data only covers 2012-2014?

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