Re: Procedural (non-technical) point about freezing the cat and hat combinators before they've even been defined (was Re: Shadow DOM: Hat and Cat -- if that's your real name.)

On 5 Feb 2014, at 11:28 am, Dimitri Glazkov <dglazkov@google.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Sylvain Galineau <galineau@adobe.com> wrote:
> 
> On Feb 5, 2014, at 10:47 AM, Dimitri Glazkov <dglazkov@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > Given how much growth Polymer had seen in the recent months, I expect these features to start getting used pretty actively.
> >
> Would you mind sharing some of the data behind this assumption? I must be spending all my time with all the wrong people because I don't get that impression at all. Last time someone told me about Polymer, it was as part of the sentence "I started Polymer and then all the lights in the building dimmed". Not kind, probably unfair, but in line with what the rest of the still small amount of feedback I've heard on the topic. Needless to say, your confident assurances of around-the-corner success sound totally wishful to me. And it's possible I'm not alone?
> 
> I don't have anything other than empirical observations: watching participation on polymer-dev list, the number of forks and PRs on github, and the overall interest on Twitter.

No judgement intended here - but I was interested to see if we could get a little less empirical.

If you look at the last three months of participation on polymer-dev, activity dropped from November 2013 (73 topics, ~373 posts) to January 2014 (57 topics, ~328 posts). Maybe you were talking about a longer period? (I didn’t check)

The number of pull requests on github processed in the last three months is zero. There were 11 pull requests merged in the last six months, but they are mostly minor. Of the last 20 pull requests, 17 are from Google engineers (and seem to be the main project contributors anyway). More than 90% of the commits to the project over the past three months have been updating a build version number. (Maybe this indicates project stability rather than interest, I don’t know).

There were 41 retweets of @Polymer’s tweet about the Blink intent to ship for the Shadow DOM. It’s quite hard to judge interest given the name, but if you search for “polymer components” it is true that there were more tweets in January than each individual month from 2013. But we’re only talking a handful a month. (I’m hoping I was searching twitter correctly - I’ve never done it before)

A search for “Web Components” on twitter shows a couple of tweets a day or so.

Meanwhile, search for “CSS Regions Blink” and you get hundreds of tweets.

Dean