Unfortunate they had to exclude Javascript. I understand why they chose to do that, but that's a HUGE chunk of data that's been pretty much randomly ignored. So can this really be considered a fair analysis given that?
This looks dubious to me. Not least do to the healthy flow of people moving from other languages to Visual Basic.<p>Also byte flow makes little sense for programming languages. lower level languages are going to be more verbose than high level languages. They'll be used for different things. Some will have tonnes of boilerplate that travels with the project (e.g java). Forked projects? etc.<p>Further, to me it seems that this ought to be a more descriptive thing of how something happened in the past and not subject to probability unless the claim is a prediction about next years conversions between languages or that conversions are stationary over time.<p>I.e a set of metrics that proxy transitions and an order list of from and to, would be just the ticket IMO.
Some possible confounding variables:
what if certain language users are more likely to squash commits?
what if certain language users are more likely to have private repos?
I used to think I understand Linear Programming, and the transportation problem. Is there a relationship between this and the Markov formulation? I'm totally confused now. Posts like this make me feel guilty about not reviewing them once in a while. And I guess while I'm at it with the questions:<p>>We have to add an artificial source and sink on both sides of our bipartite graph to ensure flow conservation<p>Wasn't there a hack with the slack/surplus variable in the LP constraints to deal with this or was it a dummy variable? Pretty sure that was able to handle the case where supply was not equal to the demand.<p>Also, how were cases where the user stopped using GitHub altogether or a new user started programming are handled?
For reference <a href="https://madnight.github.io/githut/" rel="nofollow">https://madnight.github.io/githut/</a> without excluding Javascript
People do so much advanced analysis with these outrageously biased datasets (this says nothing about "developers", this has analysis of "developers who put repos on github, skewed towards prolific repo creators")<p>Yes, it's the only dataset you have. You still sound dumb when you inflate the importance of the population you have data for to make the anlaysis sound more useful.
In 2-3 years, I guarantee you that Elixir will appear strangely absent from this blog post<p>Source: Consistently steep slope over time of Indeed job interest in Elixir plus the fact that ElixirConf doubles in size every year