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> But thrift and protobuf are by far the most popular [citation needed] (seriously, I'm interested) XML seems far more popular (in the sense of market-share/a

• ankrgyl 16y ago
  That's a good point, but I think by "most popular" the author was referring to popularity in the hacker/startup community. One could make a similar argument about operating systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_share.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_sha...) or web browsers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers), but I don't think anyone on hn would call Windows XP or Internet Explorer "popular"
  • 6ren 16y ago
    That makes sense, since most startups are technology users, rather than technology seller. e.g. for a startup selling tools/middleware, technology market-share is customer market-share. Thinking further, startups might be early-adopters of new technology, that will eventually become mainstream. But it doesn't seem to be a reliable predictor, since many (most) new technologies don't reach critical mass before being replaced by the next new thing. eg. ASN.1 binary serialization format. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One