Month: September 2016

400,000 GitHub repositories, 1 billion files, 14 terabytes of code: Spaces or Tabs?

Here is an interesting bit of research – do people prefer tabs or spaces when programming the most popular languages?

Tabs or spaces. We are going to parse a billion files among 14 programming languages to decide which one is on top.

The results are not very surprising and somewhat disappointing (for all of us, tab fans):

As far as PHP goes, I’m sure the choice of spaces has to do with the PSR-2 coding style guide, which states:

Code MUST use 4 spaces for indenting, not tabs.

On a more technical note, I think this is also related to the explosion of editors and IDEs in the recent years, which, as good as they are, aren’t as good as Vim. Vim allows for a very flexible configuration, where your code can be formatted and re-formatted any way you like, making tabs or spaces a non-issue at all.

Regardless of the results of the study, what’s more interesting is the method and tools used. I’ve had my eye on the Google Big Query for a while now, but I’m too busy these days to give it a try. The article gives a few insights, into how awesome the tool is. 1.6 terabytes of data processed in 864.6 seconds:

That query took a relative long time since it involved joining a 190 million rows table with a 70 million rows one, and over 1.6 terabytes of contents. But don’t worry about having to run it, since I left the result publicly available at [fh-bigquery:github_extracts.contents_top_repos_top_langs].

and:

Analyzing each line of 133 GBs of code in 16 seconds? That’s why I love BigQuery.

If you enjoyed this article, also have a look at “Analyzing GitHub issues and comments with BigQuery“, which works with a similar-sized data, trying to figure out how to write bug reports and pull request comments, so that they would be acted upon faster.

Kids react to Metallica

This video made me feel very, very old. Ancient almost. I grew up with Metallica and it is shocking to realize that kids these days don’t even know the band. Apart from that, the reactions are funny. New generation …

By the way, there are more videos in that YouTube channel (see the Windows 95 for example). Radio Nostalgie … :)

Quora: if programming languages were countries …

“If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?” over Quora is hilarious! Here are a few bits to get you started:

C – Russia. Everything has to be done in a backwards way, but everything is possible, and there’s a lot of legacy.

C++ – USA. Powerful, but more and more complicated, unreadable, error-prone. Tends to dominate and influence everything.

Haskell – Monaco. Not many people, but very rich, so they don’t have to consider lower classes’ problems.

Java – Sweden. Comfortable, but has its own king and currency.

JavaScript – China. Developing really fast and can do lots of surprising stuff. A lot of users.

PHP – Bangladesh. Poor, but numerous, and it’s found all over the web.

Pascal – Germany. Strict rules, good performance. And there are many people who just don’t like the language.

Bash – Switzerland. Not very big in itself, but pulls the strings of the others.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

Page builders and multilingual WordPress websites

WPML.org, the web home of the WordPress Multilingual Plugin runs this blog post about the upcoming support for WordPress page builders. Apart from the good news themselves, there are some insightful results of the survey that the team did, trying to understand who uses page builders and how. I found the stats on which page builder solutions people use the most interesting:

At work we are primarily using Divi (when we are not building our own themes), but we’ve also done a few sites with Enfold. I’ve also seen Avada in the wild. But I can’t tell you which ones are better, because when it comes to using page builders, I’m mostly not involved. These tools are so awesome these days that they can be easily used by a non-technical person. Which is exactly what we do ;)

StackOverflow: Docker vs. Vagrant, with project authors’ comments

There is this discussion over at StackOverflow: Should I use Vagrant or Docker for creating an isolated environment? It attracted the attention of the authors of both projects (as well as many other smart people). Read the whole thing for interesting insights into what’s there now and what’s coming. If you’d rather have a summary, here it is:

The short answer is that if you want to manage machines, you should use Vagrant. And if you want to build and run applications environments, you should use Docker.