[hellofunk]

This article is dated October 2017 and claims to be the first large-scale evidentiary study. But I have definitely seen either this exact study or another one nearly identical, also using GitHub and also having similar results for the languages, and that was at least 1 year ago. So perhaps this article is a re-print of a prior study?

[mrmeh]

That's how CACM research highlights work. A published paper is invited to be featured as a highlight. The paper is edited somewhat, generally it's made smaller with some details removed. The edited paper will then appear some time later along with a discussion of the paper written by someone not associated with the paper. If the paper is controversial, as this one is, a long time may pass between the original date of publication and the publication of the CACM research highlight.

[lomnakkus]

Here you go: http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~filkov/papers/lang_github.pdf

Seems to be from 2014 and has the exact same list of authors, I think. (Hosted in ~filkov which I'm assuming is the www_public of Vladimir Filkov.)

No idea what changed since then.

[hellofunk]

Not just the same list of authors; the article and this PDF have nearly the same verbatim wording.

[dang]

I was wondering that too, because of https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Large-Scale%20Study%20of%2.... I think we'll put 2014 above.

Edit: two in one night! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15382275