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Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

Using something just because it's popular is absurd. You will be switching to next "hip" thing every project then?

That's kind of like saying it's absurd to switch to a new social network because it is popular... as with social networks, languages/platforms are more useful when more people use and contribute to them.

Good libraries cover a multitude of language feature sins.

The article is about momentum not necessarily newness or hipness. Node.js is only three years younger than Rails.

shhhhhh, it's to new and trendy.

This thread inspired me. I am giving up JavaScript completely and am writing a browser in Fortran that only allows Fortran servers and Fortran in the browser. I mean, everything else is new and trendy. Fortran or gtfo newbies!

I have a great name for your browser: "Retro"

Node.js was first released in 2009, Rails in 2004 -- five years, not three.

Note the part where they rewrote their frontend everytime a cool new framework came out.

One upside is clearly that it helps attract raw talent more easily with a hot/trendy stack, and to me, it's a more exciting adventure overall (more risky though).

Talent that comes in because a stack is hot/trendy are there by virtue that they lack the experience to know it's nothing knew. They haven't seen other hot/trendy stacks fail yet.

Meaning they probably also lack experience to make decisions that avoid turning greenfields into a muddy hell. No thanks.

I agree, lets not use hot and trendy, who needs any of that? Rails? TO TRENDY! Lets use Fortran and COBOL!

it depends what you mean, but i probably disagree - popular frameworks have more stack overflow answers, better docs, more bug fixes, and bigger ecosystems in general

i do not use rails but it probably is the cheapest alternative (from an engineering perspective) right now given the number of available engineers + ecosystem

Not sure about the cheap aspect tho, in my area rails developers are one of most well paid.

fair enough - if you really want to save money - youd go with php

Worthwhile PHP developers are not cheap either. Unless you mean WordPress developers. (no, they're not PHP developers, they're WordPress developers. They only know WordPress)

Apparently they did. They went from jQuery to coffeescript to Angular to React, according to the post.

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