Why was this comment downmodded to zero? (I've upmodded it to one). It is well written, thoughtful and makes a good point. I understand people disagreeing with it, but downmodding it to zero is just insane. I've seen this phenomenon increasing on HN recently and have "rescued" a couple of comments (i didn't agree with them but thought they didn't deserve the severe downmodding).

If PG were to allow scripting HN, like he said he would, I'd probably write a script to tag a commenter as "someone I'd like to follow" and let me know when they got downmodded into oblivion!

There is a big difference between the use of voting for filtering large amounts of content and using it as a way to express opinion. The former is serverd perfectly well by upvoting. The latter is unworthy of intelligent beings in my view.

I can't disagree with this enough. Why do you need to talk to people? Why do you need to reuse other peoples code? Perhaps for some people, the community matters, but I don't think that's common.

Obviously you need to have decent language documentation, but that's not a community, it's just the specs.

If so, my hat is off to you my friend. But that's not me, after 15 years as a professional and two degrees, and I'll wager that's not anyone else reading this either. In my experience, the community around a language trumps all other factors for getting stuff done.

If you run into issues, you need to be able to solve them. If the language is well documented, you can use that. If there are tons of books on the language, you can pick up a book.

I'd say asking the community is usually a last resort. Ever asked the PHP or Javascript community questions? Most of them have no idea. They'll give you terrible, often incorrect answers. Ever asked the Java community? Most will recommend you use XML to create a FactoryFactoryGenerator pattern on Jetty using enterprise beans. Ask the lisp community? They'll burn your house down for assuming you're worthy of asking them a question.

Obviously these are generalizations, and I'm sure there are some great javascript,php,java,lisp etc communities around.

Choosing the language based on the community amounts to just following the other sheep, rather than taking an unbiased decision about which language best fits the job required based on factors including libraries available, books, maintainability, ease of hiring people in later etc etc

Also I'd say communities like this (Hacker news) are far more valuable than specific language communities.

More than one project I've started in Lisp here (not to pick on Lisp, just as an example) and run into an issue that I could implement myself in time T or do the whole lot in Python in time T/10. It's a no-brainer. For non-trivial tasks to be completed within fixed periods, striking out on your own with a new language is a meaningless risk.

So I guess you like implementing all your libraries yourself?

- What are my friends using?

Each of these languages has online communities that are ready to help. Some more than others, but they all minimize the need to have real life friends who use the given language. Physical groups can be beneficial, but thanks to the internet they are no longer strictly necessary. Also, in most cities there are usergroups if you'd like to interact in person with the community.

- What are the people in my field using?

There are advantages associated with using a language or DSL/framework that's popular within your field - there is no denying that. But you shouldn't underestimate the competitive advantage that a more obscure language that's better suited for the task can give you over your competitors. PG used Common Lisp without a relational database for Viaweb. Yet in part that was the secret to his success. I suspect that using Lisp or Haskell in places where everyone else still use C++ or Java, may be a major competitive advantage thanks to the increased productivity and more robust code you can write with them.