On Friday, July 8, 2011 3:47:09 PM UTC-4, cjrh wrote: > > *Why* should we care how many users we have? >>> >> Again, this is not the most important thing, but the number of users is >> not entirely without consequence either. Generally, more users will >> translate into more expert contributors and volunteers, which will >> contribute to the development of the framework and its ecosystem and to its >> long-term sustainability (i.e., more features, better testing and >> performance, better documentation, more plugins and applications, better >> support, more third-party hosting and development tool support, etc.). >> > > This is almost definitely not true. Or rather, it certainly hasn't been my > experience anyway. The number of people in a project or community appears to > have no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the code or the abilities of > contributors. > It's not just about the core framework, but the larger ecosystem. Right now there are several hosting services in beta dedicated specifically to hosting Django apps. Pycharm includes special functionality to support Django development. There are lots of libraries and reusable apps specifically for Django. (Not to mention what you can find in the Rails, PHP, or ASP.NET worlds.) So, I think there can be some benefits to a larger community and user base, though such benefits may not matter to everyone. > In many cases, when you select a framework, you want some confidence that >> it will still be actively maintained several years hence, and that >> confidence will be bolstered if there is a sizable and active community >> around it. >> > > I still don't see why this is my problem, or indeed even yours, or anyone > else's for that matter. I do not see why I need to care about whether some > pointy-hair boss thinks web2py will be actively maintained in the future. I > have selected web2py on technical merit. I do not care how active the > community is, for I have the source code. > Yes, but not everyone wants to worry about having to take over development and maintenance of their app's framework should it be abandoned by its core developers. Why do we worry about backward compatibility? Backward compatibility only matters if the framework is actively being developed to begin with, so concern about backward compatibility follows from a concern about long-term sustainability. I agree that technical merit is critical, but it's not the only consideration, at least not for all users.
> In truth, I have selected web2py because my value system around coding has > a large intersection with Massimo's, IMO. I value the conveniences that he > built into web2py early on; conveniences that other frameworks left "as an > exercise to the reader". I think that matters. I think that remains a > selling point for web2py. > Hear, hear! > But our PR face is way, way too defensive. I understand that *we *might > not see it like that, but if someone like Graham happens point out that that > is how it looks from the outside, then we should take note of that. > Note, this thread is from back in January, and in the past few months, there has been relatively little negative reddit activity, so perhaps we have already moved on to better days. :-)
