Julia Evans

Do Rails programmers use node.js? Visualizing correlations in command usage

A few months ago I got curious about which unix command line utilities were the most popular, so I ran a survey on Hacker News. I ended up getting 1,500 responses or so.

Once I had that, I wanted to know how commands are related to each other: do people who use gcc use python? What about scala and clojure?

So I made a visualization to explore this question! It shows a graph where commands which are strongly correlated together are linked (for example ruby and rails).

You can look at it here. I enjoy it a lot, especially the part of the graph around gcc, because it’s pretty sparse. Try clicking ‘See the whole graph’; it’s beautiful. Just do it in Chrome, not Firefox.

Day 15: How a .gz file is structured, redux Day 16: gzip + poetry = awesome