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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

OT but this made me think of RubyMotion, which I remember being wildly popular (among Rubyists) back in the day but don't hear much about it now [0]. How many people still use it?

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rubymotion&sort=byPopularity&p...

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RubyMotion was amazing but what it had in ability was superseeded by React Native with everyone and their mother doing a React + Rails combo for websites now. In the end, writing plain Ruby became more cumbersome than writing React so people just abandoned the platform. The price tag of React Native didn't help the issue either (free) along with it just being a npm install away.

I do not thin react native superseeded RM by being a better product. RM is super polished but failed at popularizing itself hence losing a very big chunk of the market. RN on the other hand crushed their competitors by its huge popularity, number of articles, documentation and tutorials available.

> RN on the other hand crushed their competitors by its huge popularity, number of articles, documentation and tutorials available.

That's means it's a better product. You can have the best code in the world, but nobody is going to give a damn if they don't know how to use it.

You've not heard of "worse is better" [1] then. Many times in the past the worse product has succeeded over the better product.

[1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Because the people who implement the technology aren't those who can admire the "quality". If it's been 6 hours at work and I have 30 minutes to pick a tech to start evaluating, I'm picking the one with better documentation/easier curve. Most people aren't a Facebook and don't need the best greatest thing in the world, just something to fix the current problem. You can kick the can down the road.

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