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Sample Programs Repo Celebrates 1,000 Code Snippets

Published at

1/10/2025

A Brief History of the Repo

I maintain a repo called Sample Programs that first started as a 100 Days of Code challenge in 2018. Back then, I challenged myself to write a Hello World program in as many programming languages as possible, and I even turned it into a series on this site.

Over the years, the repo has evolved dramatically. For instance, one of the earliest changes was the addition of different types of programs. If I recall correctly, I added “reverse string” and then “game of life,” the latter of which is no longer a part of the repo.

Around the same time, I started advertising the repo on dev.to to see if I could get any contributors. In the early stages, it was pretty easy to contribute because many of the popular languages, like JavaScript and C, needed contributors.

Then, I discovered Hacktoberfest, which quickly became my main way of getting help on the repo. By creating issues targeting specific holes in the repo, folks were quick to jump on them. It wasn’t long before I started to get some repeat contributors.

Eventually, the repo got popular enough that folks began helping expand it in new and interesting ways. For example, we put together a documentation site that would show off all the programs in the repo and even support documentation for them where needed. Likewise, some folks were interested in ensuring that all the programs of a particular type behaved identically. As a result, glotter was created to help us test all the programs.

Since the beginning, a lot has changed about the repo. As of today, there are 37 different types of programs (which we call projects) that can be implemented in the repo, all of which are automatically tested. That’s quite the change from the original “Hello World in Every Language” challenge. In addition, the repo has amassed 154 programming languages, of which 153 are tested.

On top of all that, the repo supports a ton of automation. For instance, testing has since been upgraded to glotter2. In addition, all of the languages have READMEs, which are generated automatically to provide readers with information about which programs are still needed. I’m sure there is even more that is slipping my mind at this point.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, the repo just hit 1,000 programs after about 7 years of work! In the remainder of this article, we’ll talk about that huge milestone.

1,000 Program Breakdown

When you consider the Sample Programs repo, it’s an interesting case study into which languages are popular and which languages have sort of a cult following. I say this because many of the popular languages are complete (i.e., have a program for all 37 projects) or nearly complete, yet there are some more obscure languages in a similar boat. I’ll show you what I mean.

Here are some languages you would expect to have contributors, at least based on GitHub’s most recent annual report of the top programming languages:

C (26 code snippets)
C# (29 code snippets)
C++ (27 code snippets)
Go (29 code snippets)
Java (26 code snippets)
JavaScript (30 code snippets)
PHP (37 code snippets)
Python (37 code snippets)
TypeScript (23 code snippets)

Yet, there are plenty of languages that don’t crack the top 10 that are clearly beloved by some (or at least interesting enough to be worthy of contributions):

ALGOL68 (37 code snippets)
Beef (37 code snippets)
Commodore Basic (37 code snippets)
Euphoria (37 code snippets)
Haskell (20 code snippets)
Julia (14 code snippets)
Kotlin (19 code snippets)
Lua (13 code snippets)
Mathematica (26 code snippets)
Octave (14 code snippets)
Perl (18 code snippets)
R (10 code snippets)
Rust (37 code snippets)
Scala (11 code snippets)

And yet, there are still some popular languages that lack contributions:

Objective-C (11 code snippets)
Ruby (17 code snippets)

In addition, GitHub keeps track of the most used languages in a repo, which I assume is based on lines of code. In our case, the top languages come out to be:

BASIC: 11.7%
Beef: 9.6%
Rust: 7.0%
PHP: 6.7%
Mathematic: 5.0%
Python: 3.7%
Other: 55.3%

There are other statistics I could probably dig up, like most popular project to implement, but I don’t quite have those on hand. Maybe I’ll make something more thorough when we hit 2,000 code snippets.

Looking Ahead

It’s really cool to me to think that a repo I put together to challenge myself has become something much larger than myself. These days, I really don’t do a ton to maintain the repo. Instead, there are a ton of wonderful folks that have primarily maintained the repo in my place over the years. These folks include but are not limited to the following:

If you’d like to see this repo continue to grow, I’d encourage you to jump in the Discord to see what ways you can help out. It’s been some time since I’ve cross-posted to dev.to, but I have that platform to thank for where the repo is today. As a result, if you’re reading this post over there, thank you for continuing to build a positive tech community.

With that said, I’m going to wrap this one up. As always, if you liked this article, there are surely several more where that came frome:

Likewise, you can help support The Renegade Coder by checking my list of ways to grow the site. Over there, you will find links to the Discord, Patreon, and Newsletter. Otherwise, take care and thanks again for all the support!

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dev-resources.site

Sample Programs Repo Celebrates 1,000 Code Snippets

Table of Contents

A Brief History of the Repo

1,000 Program Breakdown

Looking Ahead