[fixermark]

Wellllllll....

Languages are used by people. So it depends, a lot, on the goals of the stewards of a language. Votes can be a useful signal for whether or not people are going to care about your language enough to adopt it.

... but it's absolutely true that voters can vote for the moon and then skip off blissfully, never having to worry about how you implement the Apollo project.

[plorkyeran]

Yeah, votes aren't useless. Obviously you shouldn't just go implement the things that get the most votes without question and ignore everything else. However, if there's two things I think I should implement and the community is much more excited about one than the other, I should probably do that one first. If something gets a whole bunch of votes and I think it's a bad idea that means I need to actually take the time to explain why it's bad rather than just leaving it languishing in the backlog. If I think something's going to be great but it doesn't have a lot of votes, it means that I need to put more work into explaining why it's useful than I might otherwise.