[_m8fo]

The premise seems to be that popularity is what's important. I'd say the useful metric is whether or not you can be productive with the tool at hand. Popularity is sometimes something that can make a framework more productive (as tutorials, documentation and libraries are released), however popularity is hardly a prerequisite.

[barrkel]

Popularity is important if you want to hire developers - developers are generally less interested in moving their career in a different direction than the industry trends.

Popularity for frameworks is also important if the framework needs adapters to enable third-party libraries to work with the framework. Depending on how opinionated the framework is, the friction in embedding libraries may hamper productivity indirectly.

If you're a one man band, then it's definitely less important. If the framework is a really good fit for the job, likewise. Otherwise, there's safety in numbers.

[anoncoward778]

"Popularity is important if you want to hire developers" 15+ year vet here. I'd have to disagree. Popularity is important if you want to hire green developers. Not if you want good ones.

[barrkel]

I've been coding for 25 years, getting paid for it for 21 years.

If you want to grow a team, you need to hire a mix of experience levels. With younger devs, talent is correlated with being opinionated - they have passion that hasn't been balanced by broad experience. And opinions are fashion-led. Find me a young dev who has no real opinions, and I'll show you a dev who has no taste.