Comment by primigenus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by primigenus | Hacker News Reader

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Let's avoid turning this into a "Meteor is doomed" or "Meteor failed" comment thread; Meteor is and has been growing consistently since it launched (see: https://twitter.com/Rahul/status/673992512768507905). The title of Sacha's post reads a bit inflammatory, suggesting something "went" wrong and that it's too late now. Rather, as his post explains, the community is currently in a bit of an identity crisis as two groups with disparate sets of opinions on where Meteor should go from here collide.

As someone who's been building with Meteor since 2012, I see all of this as a good thing. It's a sign more and more people are lending their voices and opinions to Meteor's direction. As NPM support arrives with 1.3, and as a more agnostic approach to view frameworks becomes part of core, we'll continue to see more people join, because the platform will be more open towards them.

Meteor was a new platform. It's now a mature, growing platform. And it will be a successful platform if we all keep contributing.

The post's title is "What Went Wrong". What kind of comments were you expecting here? Running an OSS project is no different than running a startup in a lot of respects – marketing and PR matters. It's great to write candid posts like this, but you can't jump into other forums where the post has been linked and try to manage the conversation after the cat's out of the bag. It ends up sounding like damage control.

Instead, you should welcome further observations about some of the perceived mistakes the Meteor team made and point out specific examples where they're being addressed.

About the tweet: It's not a graph, rather some neat bars, until it has some numbers. It is suggested that it shows relative growth, make it relative to point zero and you get undefined-ly long bars, or compress it to make it look like the product is stagnating: http://i.imgur.com/TOBLaSa.png

Also, consistent growth isn't really enough, usually, to capture a market and exponential growth is usually expected from startups.

Agreed.

This seems to be the same issue with other frameworks when they get to a point where they have enough adaptation and find out they need to change/update parts of their framework to get it to the next level.

Same thing is happening right now with AngularJS. Been around for a while, had massive adaptation, then they realized they needed to make major changes. Enter pivot to 2.0 which pissed a lot of people off, but the heat is dying down now and people are coming to their senses.

I'm pretty sure at some point React and other frameworks will hit their wall too.

Rails didn't hit that wall. Neither will Ember. FYI Ember is introducing new ideas by the second (pods, composable components, components over controllers, DDAU, etc) but the community eagerly awaits and embraces them. I don't know why that is.

Rails forked sometime ago (around 2.0) into Merb then later on merged back into Rails 3.

Similarly Node forked into io.js then later back into Node 4.

This is really a fantastic point. It's sometimes as if people think these type of projects exist in isolation and any perceived flaws are permanent. They often fail to appreciate how much the flaws will invoke a response to address them, making them better than they would have been had the flaws never been strongly felt by the community in the first place.

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