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Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by davidw on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @05:45PM (#619401)
> The reasons mostly have to do with ... lots of well-tested libraries ... lots of people who've already had any problem you're likely to encounter, as long as you're doing things in the obvious way, etc.

Economics has given us the wonderfully pretentious sounding term "positive network externalities" to describe products that become more valuable, the more people who use them. Simple concept, big, impressive term.

http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics

Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by elai on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @07:56PM (#619565)
Many languages have this kind of community IMO. After a certain size, it doesn't matter really how big the community is because there is enough to sustain help. After a certain point, it only helps in finding specialized sub-communities which need to be that minimum size too. I think almost any language that a person here would consider for some project or another has that community, and you'll really notice the difference w/ languages that don't. For example, SML is a language that is so tiny that you can really notice the lack of community (and free documentation...) compared to, lets say, python, or objective-c.