> I don't think it works like that. Put enough barriers to adoption (lack of: easy install, good documentation, friendly community, good error messages, bug fre

> I don't think it works like that. Put enough barriers to adoption (lack of: easy install, good documentation, friendly community, good error messages, bug free implementation, good libraries) in front of your prospective hacker audience and you'll find that adoption will suffer. I can see your point, and I agree on principles. I disagree on "good documentation", "friendly community", "bug free implementation", "good libraries"... If there are either lacking of "good documentation" or "bug free implementation" or "good libraries", that just means a language either is academic or not ready yet for production, thus you'd better skip it. About "friendly community", I'd rather say that there are self-selecting communities. For instance, many people complain about "social problems" of Lisp, yet I had a very nice experience while asking even controversial questions on comp.lang.lisp. > If you haven't reached a certain level of confidence that a path is the right one within a given amount of time the natural thing for an experienced programmer is to abandon the path, after all, there are so many technologies to choose from that you can't afford to invest too much time into something that feels like a dead-end, even if in the longer term it might turn out to be great. That's why I've resolved to put my time only in both time and battle tested languages like Common Lisp and Erlang. Thanks for sharing your view, Jacquesm :)