As TFAA hints, the Branches and Tags counts don't provide any useful information, they're highly dependent on the author's coding and usage style and are orthogonal to any interesting information about both the repository itself and user engagement with the repository. Consider: Django has 38 branches and 41 tags, Rails has 25 branches and 183 tags, Symphony has 6 branches and 44 tags, Play has 4 branches and 48 tags, Flask has 15 branches and 16 tags. What did that tell you about them? Nothing.
> It's a shame he didn't add the language colour bar into the final comparison screenshot. I thought that was one of the best changes.
I thought not including it was an excellent choice: aside from providing a jarring dash of colour it is a complete waste of space, if you interact with the repository you probably know which language(s) it is coded in, and if you don't you probably don't care.
> if you interact with the repository you probably know which language(s) it is coded in, and if you don't you probably don't care.
I don't care about language per se, but I do care about managing the operational complexity of our stack. The programming language is a relevant factor on that score. A project in a new language may require new staff expertise, a new interpreter, a relatively high number of new dependencies, a relatively high investment in new monitoring systems, etc.
That said, I don't like the language color bar so far, because I'm having trouble confidently identifying which color is which language. For example: the reddish/orangish color space has JavaScript, Ruby, and the various JVM languages. The appearance of these various reds and oranges frequently shifts due to f.lux and differences between the three monitors I commonly use at work and home. Maybe I'll learn the colors better as I get used to the new repository format, but then maybe I won't.
In practice, I look first at the project description and the beginning of the README to see how the project describes its own strengths and weaknesses. Many projects describe their major language choices and runtime requirements as a part of that description, so I never look at the language color bar unless I need to.
> In practice, I look first at the project description and the beginning of the README to see how the project describes its own strengths and weaknesses. Many projects describe their major language choices and runtime requirements as a part of that description, so I never look at the language color bar unless I need to.
And even if they don't clearly spell those out in the readme, metadata/packaging files are usually at the top level of the library.
Language is an important factor in how hard the project will be to run/build, modify or otherwise actually work with. If it's a library for a language I don't use, I'd like to know that pretty quickly.
That's probably spelled out or trivial to infer from the readme (or file structure, top-level metadata & packaging files are generally obvious). Knowing pretty quickly I get, but the current prominent (most so for some languages with bright red-ish colors) bar takin the whole width of the screen is way over the top.
> It's a shame he didn't add the language colour bar into the final comparison screenshot. I thought that was one of the best changes.
I thought not including it was an excellent choice: aside from providing a jarring dash of colour it is a complete waste of space, if you interact with the repository you probably know which language(s) it is coded in, and if you don't you probably don't care.