<story><title>Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages</title><url>https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mooreds</author><text>My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don&amp;#x27;t update it as often as they should?&lt;p&gt;The problem with unpopular languages is twofold:&lt;p&gt;* lack of talent that can step right in and be effective&lt;p&gt;* lack of resources to push the language forward&lt;p&gt;The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that investment in them. (It can also be a useful filter, making sure you are hiring someone who is really interested to the company and is willing to make the time investment to learn what is probaly not a very portable skill.)&lt;p&gt;The second is a bigger problem, if the main sponsor of the language moves on. If the main sponsor is committed, then you&amp;#x27;re probably fine. (I have no idea who pushes Elm forward, looks like there&amp;#x27;s a foundation from the wikipedia page.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rtfeldman</author><text>Worth noting that in our experience, hiring has gotten &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; easier for us since we became an Elm shop. We really struggled to hire React engineers (who have a zillion positions to choose among - why would they pick ours?), whereas there seem to be a lot more great programmers who want to use Elm than there are companies hiring for Elm positions.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a verbatim quote from a cover letter (one I happened to be reading this morning; we see a lot of similar stories):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Despite my valiant evangelizing of Elm, my company has decided to embrace React over Elm, so I am looking for opportunities to develop Elm professionally.&lt;p&gt;Our Head of Talent said she&amp;#x27;d never seen an inbound pipeline as strong as ours, and the #1 reason people cite for wanting to apply is Elm. The &amp;quot;Python Paradox&amp;quot;[0] is real!&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;pypar.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;pypar.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages</title><url>https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mooreds</author><text>My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don&amp;#x27;t update it as often as they should?&lt;p&gt;The problem with unpopular languages is twofold:&lt;p&gt;* lack of talent that can step right in and be effective&lt;p&gt;* lack of resources to push the language forward&lt;p&gt;The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that investment in them. (It can also be a useful filter, making sure you are hiring someone who is really interested to the company and is willing to make the time investment to learn what is probaly not a very portable skill.)&lt;p&gt;The second is a bigger problem, if the main sponsor of the language moves on. If the main sponsor is committed, then you&amp;#x27;re probably fine. (I have no idea who pushes Elm forward, looks like there&amp;#x27;s a foundation from the wikipedia page.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_0w8t</author><text>Yet another problem is that for an unpopular language it is easy for its developers to introduce incompatible changes. If one does not have resources to fix the codebase, it is not much different from the developers abandoning the language.&lt;p&gt;Elm still at risk of such changes, witness fundamental change to it&amp;#x27;s event subscription model after 0.16.&lt;p&gt;Of cause, such incompatible changes may happen even with popular languages. But at least you know that you are not alone and there will be companies that support your version. Like, for example, the case of Python2, still supported and even installed by default on many systems instead of python3.</text></comment>