Recently a foreign developer (Balazs Saros, hereinafter referred to as Balazs) in his blog published an article appears in the "denounce" the article Chinese developers, the title plays a little bluffing - "Chinese repos are ruining the Github trending page "(Chinese developers to create the repo is destroying GitHub Trending page).
▲ At first glance I thought Chinese developers of open source projects staged a big news
At the beginning of the article, the author wrote a statement designed to avoid misunderstanding, he said he had no objection to GitHub Trending on non-repo English language, because it is a good thing, after all, to ensure that the poor standard of English developers can in this popular pages have a place. He mainly wanted to point out deficiencies user experience design GitHub Trending page and want to be able to fix this GitHub.
Balazs said, to open their own GitHub Trending page at any time, a great probability will see many repo created by Chinese developers, and even met before 10 projects in nine cases the use of Chinese, as follows:
GitHub Trending was originally a very significant function, to developers, this is a great place to find interesting and excellent open source projects, open source projects, and this is exposure and access to an effective channel of interest. But Balazs said he was increasingly reluctant to open this page, the reason is that GitHub Trending basic long been created Chinese developer repo "Pa list."
Balazs said that although these can be translated to the readme file repo aid of translation tools in order to understand the project, but the presentation page of the project, the screenshot appears in the text is not in English, the code did not even comment in English. In addition, most of these items are created for some specific groups, such as developers prepare for the job search and organize "face by" material, or the content of some tutorial classes.
For the emergence of this phenomenon, Balazs gives his own analysis, for three reasons:
- 中国在软件开发/技术方面的实力正在追赶美国，并开始大力扩充人才库
- 投身软件开发行业是让“那里的人”摆脱贫困并拥有更多机会的一个最好的途径（有时甚至是唯一途径）
- GitHub 正在迅速扩张市场并且在开发者群体中拥有非常大的影响力，所以这些人将 GitHub 视为一个获取资料和解决方案的地方就不难理解了（中国人可无阻碍访问 GitHub 也是重要的影响因素）
最后，Balazs 再次强调自己并非是在抱怨这些 repo 以及创建这些 repo 的用户，他认为总体来看这是一件好事，但却破坏了 GitHub Trending 的使用体验。为此，他提出了自己的想法：
- GitHub 现在可通过 repo 包含的代码来判断项目使用的编程语言，然后在 GitHub Trending 提供依据语言来浏览项目的筛选项。因此，GitHub 可考虑根据 repo 的 readme/docs/etc 文件使用的自然语言来对这些项目做出区分。同样的，然后据此在 GitHub Trending 中提供一个与地区相关的筛选项，默认值当然是 “worldwide” —— 避免对排行榜造成影响。
- 参考 repo 的 LICENSE 文件，GitHub 可以考虑给 repo 创建者提供添加 LANGUAGE 文件的选择，这样无疑比自动判断自然语言更准确。
- 将上述两点结合起来是最佳的做法，也就是说在 GitHub 判断项目使用的自然语言后，repo 的创建者还能进行修改。
对此你有什么想法？欢迎留言交流。