Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tmikaeld 4387 days ago
A programming languages superiority is not all that matters.

Looking at the most popular ones - the learning usually sparks from necessity - setting up a blog and modifying it (Wordpress -> PHP), making a webpage interactive (jQuery -> Javascript).

From that necessity grows a community that creates libraries, classes, plugins, extensions, scripts, full frameworks and even servers (node.js).

This all makes it very hard to prioritize a language that doesn't have such easily accessible libraries, classes, plugins, extensions or frameworks readily available and it becomes even harder when there is a small community to gain knowledge from.

Talking from my own experience, when you are learning it is fun to create libraries, classes and plugins - but when you are up to your ears in real work a very small amount of time can be spent on creating content for the community.