[python-committers] Statistics: growth of core dev number vs growth of the code size/complexity

[Brett Cannon]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2017 at 15:17 Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I wrote a quick & dirty parser to compute statistics on *new* CPython
> core developer per year using the following page as data:
> https://devguide.python.org/developers/
>
> 2007: 15
> 2008: 19
> 2009: 11
> 2010: 20
> 2011: 12
> 2012: 9
> 2013: 4
> 2014: 10
> 2015: 2
> 2016: 5
> 2017: 2
>
> Compare these numbers to Stéphane Wirtel's statistics on pull requests:
>    https://speakerdeck.com/matrixise/cpython-loves-your-pull-requests
>
> => Number of active core developerson on GitHub pull requests: 27
> (stats from February 2017 to October 2017)
> (I'm not sure of the meaning of this number, it's the number of core
> developer who authored pull requests, I don't think that it counts
> core developers who only made reviews.)
>
> If you look at the size of the source code, it's still growing
> constanly since 1990:
> https://www.openhub.net/p/python/
>
> 2007: around 783k lines
> 2010: around 683k lines
> 2013: around 800k lines
> 2015: around 875k lines
> 2017: around 973k lines
>
> The number of bugs is also constanly growing. Statistics on bugs since
> 2011:
> https://bugs.python.org/issue?@template=stats
>
> 2011: around 2500 open issues
> 2013: around 4000 open issues
> 2015: around 5000 open issues
> 2017: around 6200 open issues
>

Do realize that open issues is a really misleading statistic as they
include enhancement requests which we historically never close unless
there's zero chance we will accept such a change.


>
> The size of the CPython project is constantly growing as its
> complexity (technical debt? what is this? :-)), but the growth of core
> developers is slowing down.
>

Well, you added code to speed up Unicode encoding/decoding, right? So it's
just adding stuff to keep things performant as well as new things. It's
just what happens when you're willing to improve things.


>
> I do consider that we need more people to handle the growing number of
> issues and pull requests, so the question is now how to find and
> "hire" (sorry, promote) them ;-)
>
> Maybe we have a problem with mentoring. Maybe the CPython code base
> became too hard to train newcomers? Maybe we are too conservative? I
> don't know.
>

I think it's partially a fact that Python's popularity has increased the
pool size of contributors, so lots of people grabbing individual things.
This leads to less of a chance to make sustained contributions. E.g. when I
became a core dev it was because I was able to grab a new issue to work on
that was easy at a very regular cadence, but I don't know if I could
rectify that at this point.
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