| > the original person suggested it's not popular because it doesn't have one, and I just don't think that's true i agree that it's not a sufficient condition, but it's an important factor and it would significantly improve the onboarding process by collapsing the decision space beginners have to navigate even going by your definition of onboarding (the effort of getting more people) - dispersing that effort across multitude of dimensions and directions is certainly less effective than coordinating and converging not intending to have an argument about popularity, but since you keep bringing up elixir - there's a lot that can be said about elixir/phoenix as to why they aren't more popular than they are, but they are more popular than clojure in every recent ranking i've checked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if anything, elixir/phoenix is a good example for how strong default improves onboarding and ecosystem cohesion, even if it doesn't make the language broadly popular i don't look at it from perspective of "what should clojure do to be more popular than php" - there are fundamental reasons why that just can't happen in this timeline i look at it from perspective of "what does this ecosystem lack that makes it hard for beginners to get going and stick" and lack of "single recommended way of doing it" is at the top of my list |