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> The good thing of open source is that people pick the best available At least at the fringes, popularity can be anticorrelated with quality. I can't count t
by mceachen 6y ago
> The good thing of open source is that people pick the best available
At least at the fringes, popularity can be anticorrelated with quality.
I can't count the number of times I've looked for a library to do some task, found an extremely popular repo with thousands of stars, tried it and had it fail in an obvious way, find that the bug was reported already (and ignored or closed or a pr was opened and ignored).
I then try some alternative, built by an unknown author, and find that it has reasonable tests (!) and good docs (!) and actually works. 12 GitHub stars.
- franciscop 6y agoThat is exactly what I mean. So you used the best available one! And so will many people. The case you are describing normally happens when the previous one has been there for a while, and the new one is, well, new. Many people will do like you, and find the new one more useful, and add their stars, and write articles, so over time it'll also become popular.
- mceachen 6y agoIf this were true, the better libraries would have more stars, especially when the age of the libraries are similar.
- franciscop 6y agoAnd this is generally true; for similarly age libraries, the one with better quality (accounting for docs as well!) is normally more popular. There are exceptions for sure, as recently popular dev's libraries become more popular because of how popular their author is, but I'd say in libraries that are 3-5+ years old this generally holds true