Just to show how Github watchers correlate to real-world popularity, my now-defunct programming language Reia is the #3 most watched Erlang project on Github, ahead of projects like Riak and RabbitMQ:

https://github.com/languages/erlang

Looking at that listing the more amazing stat is that twitter bootstrap is #3. That was just released a few months ago and is "simply" an html ui framework. I think this highlights that over anything else, what most developers really need is a solid web ui to get started with.

Call me a cynic, but how is this relevant? Everybody knows that Node is popular. It's like adding "Rihanna scores #1 hit record" as a news item.

congrats to nodejs , it is the shiny new thing, but it is still not there yet

rails is lot older and it came to github when forking was the norm , watching came lot later

in terms of forks nodejs is half the popularity of rails, but I wish more contributors for nodejs

I think this is a little sad. Pragmatically, NodeJS is great. But the only reason it's popular is because browsers only run one (deeply flawed) language.

I wonder how much of the popularity is because popularity was perhaps a goal of some of the NodeJS advocates. Recently I stumbled on http://nodejs-vs-ror.nodejitsu.com, which in the source at https://github.com/mmalecki/nodejs-vs-ror/blob/master/public... seems to imply beating Rails follow count was a goal. I'm not sure where I found the link but probably here on HN.

I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub."

I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.

Silverlight was very popular when it was first released too.