The way people code is very interesting—there is a lot of forking, a lot of thinking, and there are projects across multiple mirrors. Google has crawled over 3 Billion lines of computer code, revealing some surprising trends. Chris DiBona presents the latest from his team's project, Google Code.
Establishing a useful metric for computer code development is an elusive challenge. How are we to make sense of lines of code and commits to repositories as metrics, when these differ widely depending on the purpose of the code and the technique of individual coders?
Research from the Google Code project also reveals the top 10 licenses used from the roughly 50 that are tracked, as well as the trends in popularity of languages and version control systems. Finally, “the most important coder in the world" is identified, "who will be shaping computer science for decades to come.”
Chris DiBona is the open source programs manager at Google, where his team oversees license compliance, promotes developer outreach, supports the open source community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and oversees OSS releases on Google Code. Mr. DiBona is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He is a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and has a masters in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
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Photo: Chris DiBona