Not going to defend choosing what’s popular just because it’s popular but the main argument for using something popular IMO is that most of the sorts of things you want to do is likely to have been done by someone else already and some of those other people will have written about their solution or made libraries etc that you can reuse. Whereas if not many people are using something then the amount of information you can find, even in the official docs, is likely to be lacking. So you can save a lot of time by using something even moderately popular compared to using something that few other people use.
However, the caveat of course is that if you blindly choose something just because it’s popular, or in spite of your own skepticism towards it because you let the hype get to you, then it is very much possible that you end up using something that is unfit for what you are trying to do and which even though someone else has used it for the same purpose is going to lead you to implement something that has poor performance, is too inflexible and/or has other undesirable properties.
But really, the proper way to choose frameworks and libraries is to look at the docs themselves and benchmarks and make your decision based on that. Not to lazily use popularity as a proxy for estimating suitability/ease of use.
"popular tech is safe because someone will have done what you want to do"
is phrased negatively in this excellent opinion piece:
with a new technology/tool, you don't know what can go wrong.
With boring technology, there's enough community experience around it.
https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
It also seems like 'boring = popular & old', 'hype = popular & new'.
> the main argument for using something popular IMO is that most of the sorts of things you want to do is likely to have been done by someone else already and some of those other people will have written about their solution or made libraries etc that you can reuse.
Yes but this holds true for something older that was popular at some other time (like Rails) and is no longer as widely promoted. Those are way safer choices.
However, the caveat of course is that if you blindly choose something just because it’s popular, or in spite of your own skepticism towards it because you let the hype get to you, then it is very much possible that you end up using something that is unfit for what you are trying to do and which even though someone else has used it for the same purpose is going to lead you to implement something that has poor performance, is too inflexible and/or has other undesirable properties.
But really, the proper way to choose frameworks and libraries is to look at the docs themselves and benchmarks and make your decision based on that. Not to lazily use popularity as a proxy for estimating suitability/ease of use.