| >The point is, a language’s popularity should not determine its usefulness. [...] More importantly, we need to stop treating them as fads, religions, or special memberships to the cool kids clubs. I think a lot of debate about "popularity" boils down to 2 different meanings of "popular". The folks defending a language that's losing "popularity" are thinking of "popular" like a high-school prom queen type of popularity. E.g. Maybe the language is no longer the prettiest girl at the dance but I don't care and nothing you can say will change my mind! But as I tried to explain in my previous message about ColdFusion popularity[1], others are using the word "popular" as an imprecise proxy for up-to-date-language-I-can-easily-get-a-job-in. E.g. Is this language widely used enough where I can tap a vast community's help to solve problems? In this 2nd meaning, "popularity" does indeed determine its usefulness. An example is Python being "more popular" than Lisp. Again, don't think of "prom queen popular" to trigger defensive essays; instead think of "ecosystem popular". Here's an excerpt[2] from Steve Huffman about migrating Reddit from Lisp to Python: >If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we’re building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren’t as many shoulders on which to stand. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19992813 [2] https://redditblog.com/2005/12/05/on-lisp/ |