[Someone]

What surprises me is that there _are_ 10,000 Scala projects on GitHub, to start with. https://github.com/search?q=scala&ref=cmdform shows 12,757, of which 9,062 for the language.

I won't nitpick about that 10%, but even 9,000? GitHub definitely has changed the meaning of 'project'. I think there must be quite a few almost clones in there or very small projects. For comparison, the BSD ports tree (http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html) claims 24,330 ports. I don't believe there's a third of that amount of Scala code available (corrections welcome)

[Goopplesoft]

> GitHub definitely has changed the meaning of 'project'

How so? The search results page you linked says:

> We've found 12,757 repository results

[Someone]

Yes, GitHub calls them repositories, but, even on its home page, also calls them projects (https://github.com: "Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects.")

Looking at http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=GitHub..., that also seems to be common terminology.

Also, both URL and title of the article (http://www.takipiblog.com/2013/12/26/the-top-100-most-popula...) do talk of projects.

Before GitHub (and, to a lesser extent, SourceForge), you would not find stuff such as https://github.com/Dub4ek/Scala_Ex (one 20 line file, called Week1ExerSizes.sc (sic)) in the same places as, say, the gcc or NCSA Telnet sources.