[wyager]

> large community of developers to hire from today + years from now

I think this is a red herring. The thing that actually matters for most companies is marginal hireability. By the time you're big enough to worry about absolute hireability (because your hiring demands exceed the liquidity at the margins) you can create a hiring pool out of thin air (e.g. if google invents a new language and shills it a bit, tens of thousands of college students will learn it for free).

If you're a small company and you're picking between Java and Elixir (or whatever) your concern should be "how hard will it be to hire 3 developers at a given quality level?", not "are there 1 million developers available?"

[lmeyerov]

No, it is, how hard is it to hire 3 elixer devs at given quality and do an elastic sprint as 6.. 3 years from now. And what is the chance the dependency chain hasn't rotted.

The million means you arent scrambling . Hiring in niche stuff even for 1 person stinks. Replacing/maintaining dead frameworks is 10x+ worse than writing the original.

When you can find and just drop someone in the same/next week and it's not all cruft... And you're sure that'll be true next year too... That's boring code. Super destressor for everyone as folks can easily scale up / down, take paternal leave, onboard junior /senior folks same-day, etc, and not worry about ecosystem churn.

Ex: It's a world of diff when we hire folks to write our django pieces vs GLSL engine, and both of those ecosystems are big. Just django is the way bigger and thus more stress free. When you go down to niche langs with niche frameworks.. unless there is a good reason, I don't want to be in that company nor bet on it 2-4yr from now. For us, we do GPU everything, so careful parts of our stack are weird and constant careful effort, and we try to limit it to just those.