Freecode New Project Registrations (1998-2011) and language tags

This chart shows the new project registrations for each year 1998-2011, and what programming language those projects were tagged with.

For example, 2003 was the highest year for new "C" projects to be registered with Freecode (then called Freshmeat).

(Couple of caveats about the data here: (1) A project could be tagged with one language when it's created, and then the tag could change later. For example a project may have been created as "C" and then later switched its tags to "Java". This chart will show whatever the most current language tag is for that project. I have not calculated the number of times this happens or if it is likely, but I suspect that it is not too common. (2) The languages in the legend are in order of the total number of times they exist as tags for any project. (3) Not every project has a language tag for itself.)

Here is the SQL code used to generate the data sets for this graph:

SELECT YEAR(p.date_added ) , COUNT( DISTINCT p.project_id )
FROM fm_projects p
INNER JOIN fm_project_tags t
ON t.project_id = p.project_id
WHERE p.datasource_id = 316
AND t.datasource_id=316
AND t.tag_name="C"
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1;

Substitute your current datasource_id and any valid programming language tag. I used the following:

C
Java
C++
PHP
Perl
Python
JavaScript

These are in order of total number of times they appeared in the sitewide tag list over time.

Other top languages, in order of frequency the tag is used:

Unix Shell
XML
SQL
HTML
Ruby
Tcl