Ohloh and the popularity of programming languages in free and open source software
22 September 2008
I came across my name in a site called Ohloh. I remember it coming out a few years ago. Now it has had time to really get going, I thought it was about time that I review the site here.
Ohloh tracks the free/open source software it knows about, they only track code held in CVS, Subversion or Git (i.e. not in bazaar, which I tend to use, or mercurial), in repositories that they can easily find. Despite the limitations, this is a very large amount of code.
Ohloh tries to figure out from the commits who the developers are, and thus my name came up (because of a very minor contribution to Gentoo once upon a time).
Ohloh also tries to figure out the usage of programming languages in free/open source software. It allows you to produce various graphs; those below are based on the total number of active free/open source projects for each language.
Some important caveats to bear in bind:
- Ohloh only tracks how the language is being used in free/open source software, the majority of code written in the world runs on in-house systems; this code is often never shared externally.
- The percentage figures may be somewhat lower than one would expect because their definition of a language is rather weaker than I would personally use, so many markup formats such as HTML or XML and specialised syntaxes are all counted as programming languages even though they are not Turing-complete.
- These are relative percentages, we are comparing languages against each other. All languages featured here are growing steadily in terms of the absolute number of free/open source programmers using them. So essentially what we doing here is comparing the speed at which languages are growing.
Regular readers will know that I like high level, general purpose, dynamic languages; so lets start with them:
Go Python! Of course these figures might be completely meaningless as Perl is often used by sys-admins who rarely share their code using public revision control repositories.
Now lets look at the big beasts, the major compiled languages. These bread and butter languages seem to be stabilising around equal percentages:
Platform-oriented proprietary languages are not heavily used in free/open source software, as you might expect, however lets compare two against each other, Microsoft's C# versus Apple's Objective C:
C# is stronger, not surprising considering the vast difference in users between Windows and OS X.
A more interesting question is whether the rising use of C# in free/open source software is evidence of a developing accommodation between the Microsoft world and the Free World?
At least that is until Microsoft next calls us all cancer and threatens to sue the whole free/open source world again.
Interesting stuff, let me know if you come up with any interesting comparisons.
1 David Jones says...
Mmm porridge.
What do you prepare your graphs in? I'm becoming a fan of Google Charts API.
Posted at 2:09 a.m. on September 22, 2008
2 Ciaran McCreesh says...
The C and C++ stats from Ohloh are highly suspect. Originally Ohloh treated C/C++ as one language. I gave them a patch that would let ohcount detect the difference between C and C++ in most cases, although it will still sometimes treat C++ headers as C. But even with that, they haven't rerun ohcount on the full history for every project yet.
Posted at 9:50 a.m. on September 22, 2008
3 Giacomo says...
You say "Microsoft C++" and then show values for "Microsoft C#", which is a very different beast. If you want to go for C#, you shouldn't mention C++ :)
Posted at 12:58 p.m. on September 22, 2008
4 Zeth says...
Thanks guys for your comments.
@David, I will have to look at the Google charts API, I have not used that yet.
@Ciaran, Thanks for that info, the whole thing is probably quite suspect to be honest. After all as Disraeli said, 'there are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics'.
@Giacomo, that was just an error, fixed above.
Posted at 2:06 p.m. on September 22, 2008
5 Roy Schestowitz says...
Careful there.Ohloh is former Microsoft employees
Posted at 11:03 p.m. on September 22, 2008