3 ms·

I don't think this is wrong, but maybe missing some nuance: Popularity definitely gives you "more stuff on the shelf", but it's also probably fair to say that

by davidw 2y ago

I don't think this is wrong, but maybe missing some nuance: Popularity definitely gives you "more stuff on the shelf", but it's also probably fair to say that at some level of popularity there's "enough" on the shelf. What "enough" is, probably varies for different projects. Just as an example, a while back I was involved in an Erlang project and while that ecosystem certainly does not have as much available as, say, Ruby, it had the pieces we needed, like a Postgres library and a few other things. The runtime itself was a better fit than others for the semi-embedded system we were working on, so in the end we chose that over more popular languages.

bsaul 2y ago
For sure you're right, it's always a tradeoff. But to compensate for a deficit in popularity, a technology needs to have tremendous merits. Language performance is only important in some very specific cases (I/O trumps CPU in most use case), type safety is now becoming pretty standard everywhere. Your example of embedded system is indeed a case where the environment has so specific constraints that the runtime behavior of the technology can make a huge difference. But for the regular "json <-> postgres" backend that are the bread and butter of our industry, i'd say it's an exception.