[nostrademons]

The same thing happened with C & C++ ecosystem in the late 90s. C++ of the time was missing critical infrastructure in its stdlib - smart pointers, windowing systems, developer-friendly networking, common protocols, package managers, and in C's case even string & collection types - with the result that everybody made their own class library to fill in the gaps. MFC, ATL, Motif, Qt, GLib/GObject/GTK+, wxWidgets, and many others.

What eventually happened was that developers largely abandoned desktop software development, instead moving to the web. They were helped along by the malware epidemic of the early 2000s, which made consumers reluctant to try any new desktop software for fear that it would pwn their computer, and by the cross-platform nature of the web. Anyway, the problem became irrelevant, C++ usage shrunk back to the complex high-performance domains for which it remained uniquely suited, and now Javascript is the "too popular for its own good" lingua franca. Ironically, C++ now has a pretty solid standard library and a core of common best practices.

Makes me wonder if we'll see a similar transition in a couple years where people abandon the web for a new computing platform (or native mobile platforms?). The confusion is there, as is the consumer adoption, but we haven't yet had a compelling trigger the way that malware was a compelling trigger for the end of the desktop era. Privacy, maybe.