Just to show how Github watchers correlate to real-world popularity, my now-defunct programming language Reia is the #3 most watched Erlang project on Github, ahead of projects like Riak and RabbitMQ:
Looking at that listing the more amazing stat is that twitter bootstrap is #3. That was just released a few months ago and is "simply" an html ui framework. I think this highlights that over anything else, what most developers really need is a solid web ui to get started with.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but Bootstrap is also relatively unique.
We've had css frameworks before, but they were usually concerned with letting you position things along a grid structure.
The great thing about Bootstrap is that it provides you with a full complement of UI "widgets" that look reasonably good, filled in a page chocked full of examples.
We have a good designer on staff and so we were slowly starting to build something along these lines, but standardizing on Bootstrap has saved such enormous quantities of time I can't recommend it enough. I've used it on two or three projects already and it makes me happy inside.
It just shows that people hype on everything and follow like sheep - doesn't matter if they need particular project or not. Developers are no exception it seems...
FWIW, I think Node is a great way to teach, explore, and learn JavaScript without the browser. It helps me learn modern JS techniques quickly. But Node powering my web-server? Like Rihanna...
PS: Check out this free online book: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ big props to the author. He's done a great job teaching modern JS.
A lot of HN stories are there to tell us what is fashionable and what is not. If it weren't for stories like this, how would I know what technologies to use! </sarcasm>
I think this is a little sad. Pragmatically, NodeJS is great. But the only reason it's popular is because browsers only run one (deeply flawed) language.
I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub."
I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.
It's my project and it's purpose wasn't to beat Rails follow count, really.
As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit.
It's also my first project using bootstrap.css.
It was a fun thing to hack on.
Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.
[+] [-] bascule|14 years ago|reply
https://github.com/languages/erlang
[+] [-] wslh|14 years ago|reply
- C# 22.2K followers
- NodeJS 2.2K followers
[+] [-] ryanfitz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phillmv|14 years ago|reply
We've had css frameworks before, but they were usually concerned with letting you position things along a grid structure.
The great thing about Bootstrap is that it provides you with a full complement of UI "widgets" that look reasonably good, filled in a page chocked full of examples.
We have a good designer on staff and so we were slowly starting to build something along these lines, but standardizing on Bootstrap has saved such enormous quantities of time I can't recommend it enough. I've used it on two or three projects already and it makes me happy inside.
[+] [-] ergo14|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hello_moto|14 years ago|reply
FWIW, I think Node is a great way to teach, explore, and learn JavaScript without the browser. It helps me learn modern JS techniques quickly. But Node powering my web-server? Like Rihanna...
PS: Check out this free online book: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ big props to the author. He's done a great job teaching modern JS.
[+] [-] maximusprime|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HnNoPassMailer|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] senthilnayagam|14 years ago|reply
rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later
in terms of forks nodejs is half the popularity of rails, but I wish more contributors for nodejs
[+] [-] damncabbage|14 years ago|reply
(I suppose it was a heavy form of bookmarking something.)
[+] [-] lucian1900|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxwell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terrellm|14 years ago|reply
I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub."
I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.
[+] [-] mmalecki|14 years ago|reply
As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit. It's also my first project using bootstrap.css.
It was a fun thing to hack on.
Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.
[+] [-] muppetman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coreyrecvlohe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jemfinch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchest|14 years ago|reply