▲ At first glance, I thought that the Chinese developer’s open source project had a big news.

At the beginning of the article, the author wrote a statement aimed at avoiding misunderstandings. He said that he does not object to the non-English repo on GitHub Trending, because this is a good thing after all, and developers who can guarantee poor English can also Have a place on this popular page. He mainly wants to point out that the user experience design of the GitHub Trending page is flawed and hopes that GitHub can fix it.

Balazs said that when he opened the GitHub Trending page at any time, he would most likely see many repos created by Chinese developers, and even encountered nine of the top 10 projects using Chinese, as follows:

GitHub Trending was originally a very meaningful feature. For developers, this is a great place to discover interesting and excellent open source projects. For open source projects, this is also an effective channel for exposure and attention. But Balazs said that he is increasingly reluctant to open this page because GitHub Trending is basically a repo “hegemony” created by Chinese developers for a long time.

Balazs said that although the repo's readme file can be translated by the translation tool to understand the project, the text in the project's demo page and screenshots is not in English, and even the code comments are not in English. In addition, most of these projects are created for specific groups, such as “face-to-face” materials that are prepared for developers looking for a job, or someTutorialThe content of the class.

For the emergence of this phenomenon, Balazs gave his own analysis for three reasons:

1. China’s strength in software development/technology is catching up with the United States and is beginning to expand its talent pool.

2. Engaging in the software development industry is one of the best (and sometimes the only way) to get people out there from poverty and have more opportunities.

3. GitHub is rapidly expanding its market and has a very strong influence among the developer community, so it's not hard to understand that GitHub is a place to access data and solutions. (The Chinese have an unimpeded access to GitHub. factor)

In the end, Balazs re-emphasized that he was not complaining about these repos and the users who created them. He thought it was a good thing overall, but it undermined the GitHub Trending experience. To this end, he put forward his own ideas:

1. GitHub can now determine the programming language used by the project through the code contained in the repo, and then provide filtering options for browsing the project by language in GitHub Trending. Therefore, GitHub can consider distinguishing between these items based on the natural language used by repo's readme/docs/etc file. Similarly, then provide a region-specific filter in GitHub Trending. The default value is of course "worldwide" - to avoid impact on the leaderboard.

2. Referring to repo's LICENSE file, GitHub can consider giving the repo creator a choice to add a LANGUAGE file, which is definitely more accurate than automatically determining the natural language.

3. It's best to combine the above two points, which means that after GitHub determines the natural language used by the project, the creator of the repo can also modify it.