Comment by plastic041

9 hours ago

This project's repo has 20K stars with only 500 forks, with less than 300 issues(including closed). Something's not right.

Compared to other programming languages:

- Gleam: 22K stars, 1K forks, 3K issues

- V: 38K stars, 2.3K forks, 11K issues

- Ruby: 23K stars, 5.6 forks, 19K issues

- Zig: 43K stars, 3K forks, 14K issues

It got 16K stars just in 4 months too. https://www.star-history.com/?repos=bendlang%2Fbend

Also how would anyone trust this? I've never seen a programming language that doesn't have 1) changelogs 2) way to download older versions 3) commit history.

I don't understand why the author thought deleting the commit history was a good idea. Imagine seeing this project for the first time. It's a repo with 20K stars, but no commits, and suspiciously few issues and PRs. It doesn't look legitimate.

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I'm not familiar with academic procedures, but a pdf on a repo, written by Fable and has no reviews, doesn't seem like a proper 'paper' to me.

11 comments

plastic041

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cedws  9 hours ago

GitHub stars have been botted to hell for a long time now. I don't know how the farms acquire so many accounts, last time I tried to register a GitHub account I had to jump through so many hoops. The platform needs an overhaul, starting with requiring a valid payment method for the social features.

0x69420  9 hours ago

victor's legit and people have been excited about his work for years; squashing the history was just a bit of an optics oopsie on his part. the star to fork ratio makes perfect sense for something like bend.

- fstar: 3k stars, 267 forks

- coalton: 1.8k stars, 111 forks

- carp: 6k stars, 267 forks

- c3: 5.8k stars, 400 forks

when something is novel/young (not having had time to grow large and accumulate issues in the vein of "1 doc page out of 1000 is worded incorrectly") and (as of yet) niche (innate barrier to entry for contribution because you have to learn from square 1 what all the moving parts look like), you don't see the same activity patterns on public source hosts as with a general-purpose language.

  • plastic041  9 hours ago

    About forks alone I get it, but look at their issues.

    - fstar: 2K issues, stars-issue ratio: 0.6.

    - coalton: 700 issues, ratio: 0.4

    - carp: 450 issues, ratio: 0.08

    - c3: 1.9K issues. ratio: 0.3

    Bend has 300 issues for 20K stars so ratio is about 0.02. Maybe their followers starred the repo as a fan activity? It could explain too many stars and too few forks/issues/prs.

    • LightMachine  8 hours ago

      The project got a lot of attention at launch, but it wasn't really ready to be used back then. There were too many limitations, like u24 numbers (yes), 2 GB memory limit, pervasive strictness (if-then-else executed both branches). It was just not practical.I think (hope) that explains a lot of it. But honestly there is also my own failure into making the language actually be used, rather than just a viral moment :( I hope it will be different this time!

      1 reply →

    • 0x69420  8 hours ago

      victor has courted a very llm-enjoyer audience and such people are famously prone to hype (which is kinda brutal in its own way cause the language itself is cool and i dont wanna make it sound like im taking away from that). but yeah, fan activity as you put it easily accounts for the missing order of magnitude, if you like.

LightMachine  8 hours ago

I honestly had no idea people would be so upset about commit history. I just wanted to avoid leaking sensitive info, that's all. I'm running through the commits to ensure nothing personal leaks and I plan on putting the history back.

Also Bend's stars came on the V1 launch. This is V2. It already had 20k before.