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Comment by AngeloAnolin | Hacker News Reader

Not really big fan of articles like this. Why the need to compare and say this one has more stars, or is more used, etc.

I am thankful that we have these frameworks / libraries / modules that have greatly helped in our software development process.

At the end of the day, what matters is developer productivity, their happiness and satisfaction (regardless of the toolkit they use), and the overall value that their product brings to their intended target (outcomes).

P.S. I use Vue, React, Angular, whichever suits the need of the client the most.

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It's a reasonable expectation that a framework with more users will have more documentation, more examples, more contributions from the community, etc. While I agree that a developer should choose based on what will make them most productive and happy, popularity is still an important factor.

When comparing 2 or more frameworks or libraries to use, I always check out the github repo and look at the number of stars. I don't see a problem with this article pointing out that this metric may not be the best indicator of usage.

Also, in enterprise consultant built apps we often have to consider what kind of talent we're going to be able to get for that project. It's much easier to get Angular and React developers than Vue developers at the moment. That could certainly change in a year of course.

It boggles my mind that companies don’t expect frontend devs to be able to transfer knowledge between frameworks. Do they just not have that skill or do companies really not believe those devs are capable of that? Or both?

We know that good devs can pickup new frameworks quickly and easily. But, when we're charging our customers top dollar they want devs who are experts day 1, and (unfortunately) we can only charge top dollar if we bring those people. But, that's just our business model... I know some other consulting companies that charge lower rates and hire people with less experience.

If approaching a choice of tech stack in a bubble; it can be a useful datapoint to know which is more widely used. Waaaay back when, maybe I would have chosen jQuery instead of MooTools if I had better metrics, both did everything I wanted.

Though to be fair; by the time it would have mattered I had moved on.

In general I agree with you, but our company is very "consistency" heavy. So someone high up has to make a decision: which framework to adopt, because once that decision is made, it's sticking for a long time.

And sadly I don't think developer happiness & satisfaction are real concerns for a company that knows how to make money.

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