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Comment by benfrederickson | Hacker News Reader

Author here - happy to answer any questions anyone has.

A user can interact with more than one repo in a month, and hence more than one language, so we shouldn't expect the percentages in the table to sum to 100. In fact they sum to about 106, which is pretty close. Does this mean few people use more than one language?

Probably many users do nothing in a typical month. How do the results change looking at yearly active users instead?

Edit: Similarly, the "Percentage of MAU" in the charts isn't percentage of active users each month, but rather the percentage of all registered users, correct?

I just saw your question on proggit, and I lazily cut-and-paste the answer for here =):

For your first question - yes this means few people use more than one language in a month. There is also a power law distribution happening with user activity each month, so most users only have a handful of events each month (which happen to be mostly in a single language). I'm trying to measure how broad support it so this was mostly done on purpose. I was finding counting total events was getting biased by things that I most have been automatic activity (I was seeing single accounts with 10K commits a day for instance).

Percent of MAU in the charts is the total percentage of unique users who were active that month. I haven't tried out with yearly active users =(

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