Language complexity, measured by how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has (opens in new tab)

If you are into novelty metrics, you might find the following interesting:

http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm

It shows how actively the gitignore files are modified.

Making people think is my favorite part of my job. :)

exactly. tooling and framework config files. for 'pre-compiled' languages also build dirs but that doesn't necessarily mean the language is more complex.

In Github's .gitignore template, too.

For example, most of the entries in the Python one are utterly inane, and won't apply to your project. You can easily trim that file to 1/5 it's size. It includes the ignores for a bunch of directories I've never see any project ever have, two unit test frameworks, two web frameworks, pip's files that are already better covered by virtualenv ignores, four different ways of naming your virtualenvs…

This isn't measuring language complexity; this is someone trying to pre-cover any potential case generated by any popular-today third party library.

"Build tool complexity" seems less reaching

Elaboration: the number of rules in .gitignore files scale pretty linearly with the number of options you have for tooling. If there are lots of tools that work with your language, your .gitignore template will be big. If there is only one or a few tools, your .gitignore template will be small.

Whether or not "language complexity" correlates with "number of options for tooling" is left as an exercise for the reader. Personally, I think there's an argument to be made for popular languages having more tooling options...

Visual Studio seems to be moving in this direction: I've noticed a .vs folder and the .suo seems to live in it for now. I guess more and more will be moved into it as time goes on, but considering the .gitignore contains VS6 ignores we'll probably be stuck with the large file forever.

And in a lot of ways, that would be an improvement to randomly dumping files all over the source tree.

Magento 2 fixes the "no namespace" issue. Everything else is still there, and some parts are taken to eleven.

A while ago, I ran PHPStorm's code inspections against Magento 1.x core code, and the result wasn't very encouraging: https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR

Also, Java is an incredibly simple language.

Yeah... Qt and Rails are in the list too. And is Symfony a language, too?

Most developers don't know the difference between IDE, language, library, framework, platform and technology.

> Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Is there really a difference between 25 and 23?

Here you go:

     *.js

There's really no common patterns of just plain JavaScript files being ignored (to some extend, other cases are mostly covered by the `node` file).

Be the change you want to see in this forum.