What if we could use GitHub to determine how common certain coding practices are among savvy developers? Imagine a site where you could search for particular coding patterns, or possibly just view total counts of particular patterns already deemed important. This could be very useful for language and library designers, students new to a language, and more.
As background, over at https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed we are discussing what features we want to see in the next generation of ECMAScript (though discussion has focused on JavaScript specifically for the most part). In https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed/issues/49, https://github.com/polotek asked "Is there any quantitative data to replace the subjective argument that 'lots of people need this all the time'?" One answer is that there could be plenty of quantitative data available if we mined GitHub itself.
This is a bit like Google Code Search was, but more geared arou