Programming languages in the left panel

[ghuser-io]

Programming languages in the left panel

[jayvdb]

Please escuse the fact I havent looked through the code yet... are the programming languages shown against each project based on the users contributions, or the languages which are occurring in the repository?

If it isnt based on the contents of the users commits / PRs, IMO it would be erroneous to create a highlight of all of the languages of all repos the user has contributed to. It would include many incorrectly deduced languages based on files in the repo which that may have no idea about.

If using repo languages, a heuristical approach to finding the users languages would be good. e.g. Derive the top 10 languages from the repos, and then confirm this by inspecting commits. https://www.openhub.net/accounts/jayvdb focuses on only a single language which it determines to be the primary language. Getting the primary language correct would be a good starting point, and much more valuable than listing a lot of languages without the reader being able to have any confidence in that 'info', as it is just silly derived data being made to look like real information.

If the languages are not verified by actual commits, a languages highlight would need a very carefully worded note about the utility of the information, and state the reader should have no confidence in its accuracy.

[ocdtrekkie]

I would really like to see this feature. I feel @jayvdb may be overengineering this. If one were to create a line graph much like the line on a given GitHub repository (https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm has a good mix of contributing languages) but for users, simply weighted by their amount of contribution to a given repository, that will be "good enough".

If someone has significant contributions to a bunch of PHP projects, they probably are, in fact, fairly proficient in PHP. Maybe they don't know Ruby but submitted a typo fix to a Ruby project... but the percentage of that will be so small it will fall into "Other", since it would be a small contribution. There's no need to worry significantly about inspecting commits, as heavy participation in a project is likely to correlate to some familiarity with the languages in those projects.