If I'm going to port some GitHub repo to some other language, should I fork it?

Question

There's a repository in GitHub that is coded in Python, and I want to port it to JavaScript, should I fork the Python repo and then change the code to JavaScript ?

Answer 1

I don't think it makes sense to do so, unless you are going to keep some of the original code around in some functionally useful way - like reusing the test suite to test your port. (Of course, it's quite likely that you wouldn't be able to do that cross-language, in a convenient way - unless the test suite is coded in a completely language-agnostic way, e.g. by executing everything to be tested as a command line application using the shell, or by executing everything using a REST API.)