On software popularity

Would be interesting to check in with the team now

This article feels like a follow up on "On Ruby"[1] and related to "It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty"[2]. The common theme I find in all three is the quality and health of a dependency. I agree with OP that stars and latest commit are not clear indicators of quality.

I think more useful indicators are tests, documentations and pull requests.

* Tests. These are things you can actually run to see if the library actually works. In most cases, you can read them and understand how it is supposed to be used. On some platforms even if the tests passed in the past, they may not pass now, for example using different version of the language or platform. The coverage of the tests would be nice, but it is hard to measure at first sight, therefore using the ratio of tests LOC to library LOC might be an indicator.

* Documentation. The documentation itself does not change how the library behaves but it is a clear indicator whether the author expected someone else to be able to use it or not, and shows a sort of responsibility. Most of weekend hacks would not have one.

* Pull Requests. If there are old and open pull requests, that seem useful, it is a bad sign for the maintainer of the project.

[1] http://hawkins.io/2015/03/on-ruby/

[2] http://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/its-ok-for-your-open-source...

An extended version of the quote would be "Don't just believe that because something is trendy, that it's good. I would go the other extreme where if I find too many people adopting a certain idea I'd probably think it's wrong. Or if my work had become too popular I probably would think I have to change." I took it from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Ju0eM5T2c

One of the problems with popularity is you will get a lot of mediocre developers who don't know what they are doing. You know, the people who pick up tools only because they think it will land them a job more easily. The same people who picked up VB.

You can't build a product with a mediocre team, no matter what tools you have.

If you have a decent team, I think they will be able to manage to build great products even with not-so-great tools. Of course, if you force them to use shitty tools, they might just decide to leave.

Wrong according to whom?

If most people believe X and that makes you think X is probably wrong, then you are probably in one of the groups that believes alternatives to X. There are lots of groups like yours, they can't all be right, and therefore your chances of being any more right than X is are slim (all things being equal). At least, with X, you have the support of the population and can fit into society during your lifetime.

And the nice thing about X is that it has been battle-tested by many people, and while it may be "wrong", it WORKS.