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Comment by bmm6o | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, you're right not to trust statements about projects "capturing mind share" and what is "really hot right now" (not intending to quote OP). People get into their little communities and don't realize that they are not at all representative of the larger world. To make something up, I can totally believe that React is really popular in the San Diego startup scene, but it's a mistake to extrapolate that too far in any dimension. Add to that confirmation bias on the part of people seeing these trends, and everything could be taking over at the same time.

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As a counterpoint, there are a decent number of people learning it around where I am in southeast Michigan. There was a conference in Detroit, they said that they got a ton of React talk submissions. I used it at a small business print shop, admittedly they just let IT do their own thing.

I think there are probably still more Angular devs, but I'll be interested to see how it evolves in the next few years.

I don't doubt that you've found a lot of people in your area who are interested in it. But it doesn't even imply that it's more popular than Angular in SE MI, much less anywhere else. You can't offer up another anecdote and pretend that it's data.

And I'm sure you did fine work, but small business print shops are not exactly industry trend setters. What difference would it make in the bigger picture if you had chosen Handlebar for that project?

But this can be countested ad nauseum via continously moving on to the next place.

We need a service that compares how software solutions are perceived.

Sometimes you have questions on StackOverflow that compare eg Angular with React, and they usually raise a lot of good points, but they are missing several dimensions:

* the products evolve, but the SO answers often don't

* the trends change as well, so what was seen as best practice 1yr ago may not be well regarded now

* you do not have an objective representation of how many people are actually supporting each technology

I think there's definitely something to be done in that space.

This is very true. A lot of people also forget that a ton of stuff that is developed never shows up in your favorite search engine. Intranets, internal apps, and so on.

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